isoglossia

Just below the summit I look up at the somewhat sketchy pitch of trail Andrej is negotiating and say, “I love that you have a newspaper sticking out of your rucksack.” Just a few weeks ago I met this Canadian son of a Slovenian emigrant. He’s recently arrived in the Old Country and today we’re on Kanin, whose ridge defines the 1947 border between Slovenia and Italy. We pick our way into the fog shrouding the subsidiary peak of Prestreljenik and the dramatic views disappear. An hour later we’re sipping beer in the lodge and he’s telling me about how he works on improving his vocabulary.

“I read the paper every day, and I look up every word I don’t know.” Andrej smooths the back page, where one can find the fluffy celebrity pieces. “Here, for example, this article about Juliette Lewis. I can get almost all of this, but I’m dying to know what this word means. ‘I love long predigro ’, she’s saying. That’s the only word in the whole piece I don’t know, and I can’t wait to get home to look it up.”

At this point, Andrej realizes that the cheerful barmaid is eavesdropping and he catches her eye. “Oprostite, kaj pomeni ta beseda, ‘predigro’?” he asks her.

With a pitying look, in beautiful English she says, “Foreplay’. Don’t worry, most men have difficulty with this word.”

In retrospect, it was ridiculous we hadn’t worked it out through morphology and context. But men feeling stupid was a key ingredient of the success of this bilingual humo(u)r-candy.

A photo essay (with better weather) about this peak is back here, and my antipodean cousin and I skied it somewhere around here.