Impressions

After a long absence, I can finally do the MacArthur thing on this blog ("I have returned."), not least because I'm also now sitting in another nation where the people don't initially speak my language and some of them wonder why I'm here. We have made the move to Portugal and my first impressions are that, long-term, we probably made the right choice, even if short-term frustrations and confusion have made the opening week less exhilarating than it otherwise might have been. Moving is always a disruption and a trans-Atlantic move to another culture is moving². We gave up a lot of comfortable and familiar things and people to come here and the upside is that almost all of the people that we've met have been so welcoming that it gives the initial sensation of comfort. And the word "things" doesn't really embody the material stuff. We're still waiting on a couple pallets full of those "things" so this temporary absence is very far from a crisis, albeit sleeping without a mattress has been getting less and less thrilling with each day that goes by. I'm all about camping but generally when I plan to do so.

The most interesting aspect to all of it has been, of course, those welcoming people. The vast majority of Portuguese that we've encountered speak English and often do so without prompting as soon as they see the likely "American" blank face when either they speak or I'm about to ask a question that I don't know how to properly produce without sounding like Twoflower (i.e. somehow if I speak LOUDLY AND SLOWLY they'll understand me.) But they're quite used to both tourists and ex-pats here and the typical pidgin sign language of "Want this?" and "Yes" gets everyone by. It's just always amusing when we walk in with our American-accented "Ola!" and they immediately respond with perfect English, like in the interesting Italian restaurant we stopped into the other day, where we started saying the Portuguese on the menu and the operator immediately stopped and said: "English? Yeah, that's no problem." Said restaurant was interesting because it seemed to be set up on a "fast food" model where you could get fresh pasta, like gnocchi carbonara, but didn't present the American fast food "vibe", as it were. It also wasn't a chain, but is instead just one outlet in Santa Clara (across the Mondego River from Coimbra) doing its own thing.

One of the other upsides was coming to a football-mad culture, where game nights are distinct outings for a lot of the population. We were out during a Monday evening that happened to be when the Primeira Liga was staging all of their games as the season nears its end. Coimbra is heavily-populated by Benfica and Sporting fans, albeit Porto wasn't playing that evening, so there's no way to tell the real ratio. We sat in a local joint, known as The Sports Bar (Portuguese humor may be underrated), to watch the second half of their match as they tried to stay in consideration for the title they've won more than any other club and the anguish of their supporters was evident when the result did not go their way. I know those feelings intimately and they don't change across cultures or locations. Meanwhile, the local semi-pro club, Académica, is playing for promotion into the second division (i.e. the fully pro ranks) this Saturday. We have tickets. If you're not going to support the locals, then why are you there? (Besides, it might be more appealing to watch than Liverpool, at the moment.)

And it's the locals that are of the highest concern in many ways. We went to a concert the other night and were greeted by a couple walking around the facade of the building like we were. They recognized Americans (blank face?) and asked why we were visiting. We said: "We just moved here." The reaction was obvious: "Ahhh...." (slight pause) "Well, welcome!" There are a lot of people like us here and it's an open question as to whether that's a positive thing for the local environment. I'd like to think it is, since adding more to the mix is the same essential element that has made the United States and modern American culture what it is, despite the efforts of the idiots to deny it. Indeed, that modern American culture is evident everywhere here, as you'll often see people walking around wearing clothing with slogans in American English and the aforementioned fast food has also permeated the environment, as one of our neighbors tried to explain our mutual address to someone else by starting with: "Do you know where the Burger King is? We're just up the street from that." That "just up the street" concept is a huge upside, as well, eager as I was to get away from our dependency on a car to do much of anything outside the house. We are a few minutes walk from two major shopping malls (they still have them here), both of them with grocery stores and a smaller one of the latter is one block away. We've been here 8 days and have already walked home with groceries a half-dozen times, which is a wholly unAmerican thing for much of our suburbanized, car-oriented situation in the States in recent decades.

It's also a popular sentiment amongst the expat group that we met up with yesterday. It was an interesting mix of people who'd been here for years or had only recently arrived, like us, many of them chatting about all the cool things within walking distance of their homes. It was also another subtle reaction moment, when one of them asked if I was law enforcement, since they'd briefly seen the word "Justice" tattooed on my arm. I smiled and showed the full piece, which is a Diego Rivera-like rendition of a fist crushing a dollar sign, with the raised fists of  red and black others within it and the words "Equality" and "Justice" basing and capping it, respectively: "No, I'm a Marxist." was my response. I could read the surprise and then wariness in the faces of a couple of them, which is a pretty typical reaction for average Americans, most of whom don't really know what that political philosophy is other than "bad." But a couple of them saw the humor in it and we moved on. It was encouraging to hear later from another of our expat compatriots describing Michigan (his birthplace, as well as mine) as: "Well, there's Detroit and then Ann Arbor and then it's all Republicans until you get to Chicago." That's pretty accurate and another sign of the detachment that modern groups of Americans feel for each other. We'll have to see how we fit in with all of these new groups here and if I can shake the "invader complex" after a while.

Brief thoughts about language

I’ve run across several little points of interest regarding language in recent weeks, much of which was based around the World Cup as the confluence of many different cultures and peoples. As most of those who know me will be glad to irritably point out, I’m a bit of a grammar marm (“unique” is an ultimate; you can no more be “kind of unique” than you can be “kind of pregnant”) and mildly concerned about the degradation of the English language (the one I know best) and communication, in general. It’s one of the supreme ironies (genuine) of life that the world’s greatest communication tool, the InterWebs, is also the thing that is most reducing the ability of the species to communicate, whether by the reduction of text to something approximating alpha-numeric Streetspeak or the echo chamber created by only frequenting information sources that agree with your worldview. But the occasional pitfalls in communication only really become prominent when trying to bridge the actual gap of language, as we saw in this year’s tournament.

Hulk fall!

 The Croatian team had basically outplayed the hosting Brazilians in the first match of the event until the referee made an atrociously bad call in the box and awarded a penalty kick to Brazil. The Croats immediately surrounded the Japanese official, protesting the call, to which he responded with a couple mumbles and hand signals. Why? Well, because FIFA, in all its brilliance, had somehow assigned a mono-lingual official to the opening display of the biggest sporting event in the world. He knew only Japanese, which none of the Croatian players knew. However, that wasn’t what upset them. What really got to them was that he didn’t know English because almost all of them were at least roughly fluent in that (as are many other officials in FIFA’s ranks…) English, as many world travelers are aware these days, has become the lingua franca of the age. Here’s where we try to wrap our minds around the idea of English being the target of an Italian term for “Frankish language”, a pidgin communication used around the eastern Mediterranean by the dominant Italian and Ottoman merchants in the 16^th century. Strangely enough, actual French (the descendants of the Franks) became the lingua franca of the 18^th and 19^th centuries before English began to dominate in the last 100 years because of the spread of American culture and hegemony.

Smażyć się w piekle?

That moment reminded me of the Euro championships two years before in Poland and Ukraine, where anti-Russian demonstrators would often appear outside the venues for the soccer matches with various banners like the “Anti-Putin League” written, obviously, in English since it was the surest way of communicating among Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, and the thousands of international visitors. What makes this reality odd to many of us is the concept of the Ugly American; that famously abrasive traveler who appears oblivious to local custom or communication except to believe that by speaking Tourist (loudly and slowly via Twoflower of Discworld fame), they’ll be able to communicate anything to anyone: “CAN… YOU… TELL… ME… WHERE… THE… LOOV-REH… IS?!” These days, he’d probably be right.

Of course, the spread of English has largely been conveyed not only by American economic dominance but also by American entertainment, including sports… making it even stranger that it would be the dominant vehicular language of the largest tournament of a sport that continues to have little traction in the US, relative to other major sports, and which many Americans actively reject as “un-American” (no accounting for taste or intelligence there.) But forms of American slang are also spreading.

If only this was the most obvious example.

Textspeak, adopted organically as a matter of convenience, continues to leak over into other electronic communications, such that many businesses are expressly forbidding it in any kind of official communication attempt (like, say, a job application.) But it’s interesting to note that the lingo common to much of that new style was adopted much earlier by such things as the TL;DR exercise or simple typos.

An example of the former case is online forum communications, where anything past a hundred words is automatically dismissed by much of the Ritalin-prescribed populace as simply too much information to be absorbed. Thus, Too Long; Didn’t Read prefixing a one or two sentence condensation of the post that, of course, removes any and all nuance and context. The latter case centers on frequent typos. Perhaps the best known is that of “pwned.” The term first arose on the forum for Blizzard Entertainment’s Starcraft game and was an expression for completely dominating one’s opponent (originally “owned”.) There’s fairly widespread dispute as to whether the first use of the term was a typo or was the mistaken approximation to the intended term by the game’s vast Korean audience. I trend toward believing the former but the latter would add a certain texture to the story that speaks even more about the language difficulties and transformations alluded to above.

In ur base, killin ur d00dz...

Most outside the gaming world have only a cursory experience with terms like “pwned”. In other words, they know that kids and geeks use it, which is similar to many other expressions and shorthands that often separate generations and which become outdated with the accession of a new cultural overlay. With the increased prevalence of technology and the tendency of people of all ages to use things like textspeak, one wonders if we’re looking at a transformation of the vehicular language from English to a pidgin form of English even among English speakers.

Incidentally, the presence of the lingua franca wasn’t the only language issue that cropped up during the World Cup. The famously welcoming hosts, who speak Portuguese unlike every other nation on their continent, were reportedly pretty testy about hearing Spanish spoken around the venues; that being the language of two of the most significant challengers to their presumed victory. Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, for NPR, was castigated by listeners for not only speaking Portuguese with a Spanish accent but also supposedly speaking Spanish with an Argentinian accent (she claims otherwise), since Argentina was the most threatening of those potential challengers. The strange interplay among cultures wasn’t solely the province of the fans, either, as otherwise brilliant commentator, Ian Darke, attempted to make a point about fans in the stadium during the US-Portugal match perhaps favoring the latter because of a shared culture and language… neglecting to remember that Brazil was a Portuguese colony which fought a fairly ferocious war of independence to remove that status. That said, the US did the same and you’ll find a lot of casual fans favoring the English national team and the Premier League because them people look like us and talk like us…

Now I begin to wonder how we could increase the spread of Braille with accents. If you’re reading in Boston, do you replace all of the Rs with Ahs?