Intermediate Highs

  I think my brain has its own sick sense of humor, especially when it comes to learning languages.  Once, while trying to describe the rules of the game Freeze Tag to my dear Saudi friend, I accidentally replaced the word for “touch” with “lick” in Arabic.  I remember my friend’s expression as I described the neighborhood children running around trying to lick each other until the street lights came on.  Then there was the time that I accidentally said “sex” in Arabic instead of “body”.  The strange thing is I don’t think I had ever learned the word for sex before.  But my brain managed to put it together and have a good, long laugh at my expense, along with the rest of the people at Arabic club that day.  To be honest, I’m still not sure which is which.  I just try to avoid the topic.  My good friend Iyad would always tell me, “Alaina, whenever you make a mistake, it never comes out as nonsense.  You always manage to say another word with a completely different meaning!”  I have always chalked it up to Arabic’s enormous vocabulary.  It seemed to me that pretty much any sound combination possible had been assigned a meaning, an incredible feat considering the language has 7 distinct letters that to an English speaker all sound like t or d.  Lately, however, I have come to realize my brain has a much keener sense of humor than I do.  My theory is that it comes from that innate language ability that humans are born with.  During those rare moments when I let my guard down and I stop thinking about where the adjective goes and what tense the verb is in, great, creative, funny things come out.  The ice breaks and the person I’m talking to warms up a bit too.  It's like we are both being entertained by some third party.  And then I realize I am having so much fun, and it’s all coming, almost effortlessly, from somewhere inside me.  Somedays, it's good to be intermediate.