Snowman Skedaddle

Imagine you work in an office. There is an enigma that always sits in the corner pounding away on a white computer. Occasionally you hear her utter a word or two, see her eyes glance furtively around in bewildered puzzlement. She might comment that it’s cold or agree heartily with someone after a bout of intense listening and far too much smiling. When you glance at her computer screen slyly as you’re walking past her to go to the hot water heater, you see a slew of words, a hodgepodge of ideas and opinions. Or is she really just typing, “Yes, yes it is cold. Exactly. Yes! That! Yes, I quite agree!” over and over again in her native language. It’s entirely possible.

Having a limited vocabulary makes existence dicey. When you are an infant, you have no vocabulary. Instead of words, your weapon of socializing is volume. You wail. You cry your bloody eyes out until that obtuse paternal/maternal figure hovering over you, their red, sweaty face contorted in agony and loathing, finally gets it right. You make them run around like mad, tearing out their hair until they ultimately satisfy your needs and you bless them with silence and a cherub smirk. And thus, communication is complete.

Sadly, at the age of twenty-two, this is not an option.

I have always enjoyed using words as a way to communicate. With English having around a quarter of a million distinct words, it makes writing and speaking a joy. Finding the precise word that encapsulates your mood or meaning is rather diverting. However, when forced to work with a limited knowledge of roughly 1,500 words, being articulate, original and, well, even half-way clever, is something of preposterous, unattainable goal. 99.9% of the time you will, indeed, sound like a halfwit.

It becomes tiresome, having “Cold, right?” muttered at you and responding only with the ever-mundane “Yes-it-is-cold.” In an attempt to liven things up and make usage of my growing vocabulary, I decide to try a different phrase. Perhaps I can’t quite yet capture “Goddamn, my nipples could cut straight through ice!” in Japanese yet, but I can try out a word besides “cold.”

My chance presents itself.

A social studies teacher walks towards me down the hallway.

“Real cold, isn’t it?”

My brain makes the logical jumps from cold to ice to snow to snowman and decides, for no sane reason, that it wants to say the brilliant phrase, “Yeah, I feel like a snowman!”

And so it unfolds:

“Real cold, isn’t it?”

“…SNOWMAN!”

And I flee.

Absolutely brilliant. No verbs. No particles. No subject. I have just blurted out “SNOWMAN!” and scurried away terrified.

It’s as if I said “Chilly out there, right?” as a way of friendly banter with a man in a general store and he shrieked back, “YETI!!” to me before hightailing it out of there.

Perhaps I should revert back to bawling as a form of communication.

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Published:
12.11.07 / 11am
Category:
amusing incidents, what i call life