A Humbling Lesson in Language

The first summer in our adopted new country couldn’t have arrived soon enough. Our small family had arrived in mid-January, at the very beginning of our first Canadian winter. As government-sponsored refugees, we did receive winter clothing. However, none of us had ever endured sub-zero weather before. By the time spring finally arrived, and then summer, we were exhausted, longing to be outside and eager to enjoy the warm weather. With the arrival of summer came the need to secure daycare for the children. Until then, they had been attending school while their parents studied English as a Second Language (ESL). Fortunately for us, the school the children attended had a daycare attached to it that operated year-round and was accepting new participants. On the first day of summer, I walked with my six-year-old daughter to drop her off at daycare. As we approached the building, I overheard someone in the neighborhood shouting something I couldn’t quite understand, though it sounded familiar, I had heard it before on TV. To me, it sounded like gibberish: “gara-la-da-le-ladi-gede,” or something like that. The expression made no sense to me, yet it was clearly something people said often. I understood enough of my second language to communicate, but my vocabulary was still limited. Common local expressions were especially difficult. The first time I heard someone say “how-aya” at a gathering, someone had to explain to me that it was a contraction of “How are you?” So, when my daughter and I heard the shouting, I asked her, “What do people say when I hear ‘gara-la-da-le-ladi-gede’?” My daughter laughed. “No, Dad, that’s not what people say! It’s an expression people use when they want someone to leave quickly from wherever they are.” “I understand what it means,” I replied, a bit annoyed for not be able to understand it and having to ask her, “but I can’t understand what they’re saying. What is the expression?” My little girl gave me a very familiar look, the one she wore when she was thinking about something mischievous. “Oh! Now that I know you know what it means, you must tell me,” I insisted. “But you always tell me never to use bad words,” she responded. “And the expression you heard has some bad words.” “That’s ok” I responded. “Well, I’ll tell you,” She continued carefully, “but you have to promise not to get mad.” “Deal,” I said. “What they say is ‘get-a-hell-out-here’” she whispered very quickly. My limited ESL skills didn’t allow me to understand completely what she had said, so I asked her to repeat it slowly. At that moment, a young woman walked quickly past us in the same direction. She smiled at us. I didn’t pay much attention. As a dedicated student of my second language, I was focused entirely on the lesson my daughter was giving me. In hindsight, I had the impression my daughter might have known who the young woman was, but at the time, it didn’t click. I was too curious about the mysterious expression. My child, patiently and carefully pronouncing each word, said: “Get. The. Hell. Out. of. Here.” “Oh!” I exclaimed. “That’s what it means!” I repeated it in my own accent, ‘get-a-hell-out-here’ which must have been quite wrong, because my daughter corrected me and repeated it slowly again “Get. The. Hell. Out. of. Here” … just as we entered the daycare. And who was standing at the entrance? The young woman who had just passed us on the street. She greeted my daughter warmly and sent her off to her playroom. Then she turned to me and, with a polite but firm tone, suggested that I learn colloquialisms from other adults. It was not appropriate, she explained, to ask a six-year-old child to teach her father an informal, rude idiom used to tell someone to leave immediately, or to express a strong desire to leave a place. I stood there, embarrassed and humbled so, I “got the hell out of there.” That summer gave me sunshine, warmth, and freedom from winter, but it also gave me a lesson I would never forget sometimes, the hardest part of learning a new language isn’t the grammar. It’s the culture hidden between the words.