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 Several
weeks ago I was riding in a cab when the driver's eyes caught
mine in the rear
view mirror and he said, "Excuse me, Miss? Can you help
me?" 
As
any hard-bitten
city dweller knows, the correct answer to a question like
"Can you help me?" should always be some version
of "It depends." I chirped,
"Sure."
"Thank
you," he said. He passed a slip
of yellow paper into the back seat.
I
stared at the paper, wondering. Was this a joke? A threat?
Hand-printed on the paper in tiny block letters was this:
proverb
peculiar
idiomatic
"Please," he said. "What is the meaning of
these words?"
I
stared at the words in the distressed way you might stare
at party guests whose faces you've seen somewhere before but
whose names have escaped your mind. Proverb? Peculiar? Idiomatic?
How on earth should I know? It's one thing to use a word,
it's another to explain it. I resorted
to shifting the topic.
"Where did you get these words?"
The
driver explained that he was Pakistani.
He listened to the radio as he drove and often jotted
down unfamiliar, fascinating words whose meanings and spellings
he then sought from his passengers.
"Peculiar,"
he said. "What does this mean?"
I could manage that one. "Strange,"
I said. "Odd. Often with a hint
of something suspicious."
"Thank you, Miss. And idiomatic?"
I cleared my throat.
"Um, it's a, well, um. It involves a peculiar use of
the language."
I
thought my use of peculiar was kind of clever. He looked confused,
a reminder that clever's not clever if it doesn't communicate.
"Uh,
let's see. 'Idiomatic' is related to the word 'idiom'. An
idiom's something that's used in, say, a particular part of
the country or by a particular group of people. People who
aren't part of that group aren't likely to use it and might
not understand it."
Watching
his puzzled
look, I did what a person often does when at a loss for the
right words: I went on talking, as if a thousand vague
words would add up to one accurate definition.
"Can
you give me an example?"
I racked
my brains. "Gapers
block," I said. A peculiarly Chicago
phrase.
But did it really qualify
as idiomatic? I had no idea because the longer I thought about
idioms the less sure I was what they were.
"And
proverb?"
I should have told the poor man right then that I might
be misleading
him down the proverbial path, whatever that really means,
but instead I said, "I think a proverb is kind of like
an aphorism.
But not quite."
"A
what?"
"Never mind. A proverb is a condensed saying that
teaches you a lesson."
"An example?"
The meter clicked off a full 20 cents while I searched
madly through my mind. "Haste
makes waste?" I finally whimpered.
But
was that a proverb? Wait. Weren't proverbs actually stories,
not just phrases? While I was convincing myself they were,
he said, "Can an idiom be a proverb?"
I
could answer that. Just not right now, now when it mattered,
now when the fate of a curious, intelligent immigrant hung
on the answers he assumed
would fall from a native speaker's tongue as naturally
as leaves from an October tree. So I retreated.
"Do
most of your passengers give you answers when you ask for
definitions?"
"Oh, yes, Miss. Very interesting definitions."
Until
that moment, I'd been so inspired by the driver's determination
to learn English, so enthralled
by the chance to indulge
my curiosity about words with another curious soul, that I
didn't fully grasp the potential for linguistic
fraud
committed
in this man's cab. Now I could barely allow myself to imagine
what kind of deformed English he was being fed by cowards
like me who couldn't simply say, "I don't really know
my own language."
I
can only trust that someone as curious as he is also owns
a dictionary. And that he figures out that, no matter what
his passengers may say, haste
doesn't always make waste at the gapers block.
(681 words)
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