✍️ Dispatch: Everyone Was Trying to Help

My many Italian misadventures with false friends

My dinner companion went to the restroom right after we ordered dessert. The order came, and before long the scoop of ice cream served with her chocolate cake had begun to melt. Still no sign of her.

Two men walked around the corner and past our table. “Does that work, warm milk?” one of them asked, in Italian.

“My mother used to add some olive oil to it,” the other said. “But warm milk is the main thing.”

Warm milk (Wikimedia photo).

Another minute or two passed, and then I got up to figure out if there was a problem. That part of the restaurant was a labyrinth. Then I heard a distant voice and followed it: a maintenance worker, broom in hand, a half-full plastic trash bag to one side. He was facing a closed door.

“Mi scusi,” I said. But he was focused on the door.

“Just try to relax!” he said forcefully, in Italian. “Try to think about something else! Think about anything else!”

That’s when I heard my date’s frustrated voice from the other side of the door. “Sono bloccata,” she said. “Sono bloccata….”

She wasn’t a strong Italian speaker and seemed to be crying. But her voice lifted when she realized I was there.

She was trapped in the bathroom, she told me. The warped wooden door was wedged into an ancient stone frame. The metal handle had come off when she pulled on it.

The maintenance man stood back, eyes wide, as I rammed a shoulder into the door. After a few tries, the door swung open. She breathed a huge sigh of relief.

Here’s the punchline. Literally, “Sono bloccata” means “I’m stuck.” But coming from the ladies’ room, it can also mean, “I’m constipated.”

The two warm-milk guys and the think-about-something-else man weren’t confused. They were trying to help.

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I’ve collected many anecdotes like this one over the years. They aren’t mistakes caused by gaps in vocabulary or grammar, though I still make plenty of those. These are more dangerous, because they happen when a speaker is convinced they know what they’re doing. The problem doesn’t come from ignorance; it’s created by confidence.

During the pandemic, for example, months went by before someone told me that each time I confidently complained about what breathing beneath my mask was doing to my glasses, I was saying they’d become impanato (coated in breadcrumbs) rather than appannata (fogged up).

Or take educato. I went a long time thinking the word praised someone’s years of study, when it simply meant they had good manners.

I usually try to be educato (EJL photo)

Stressing -- or not stressing -- a double consonant can create problems best avoided by anyone hoping to appear educato. To wit: anno (year) versus ano (anus); penne (a kind of pasta) versus pene (penis); or pale (shovels) versus palle (testicles).

Or vowel endings. As someone who talks a lot about both coffee and dogs, you can imagine the subtle chuckles at the neighborhood bar when I used to ask for zucchero di cane (dog’s sugar) instead of di canna (brown sugar).

Or when friends explained that ritardo and lardo weren’t insults from my politically incorrect youth, but rather a way to say someone’s late (ritardo) and to refer to a delicate and buttery kind of cured pork fat (lardo), respectively.

When I think back on these moments, I hardly remember embarrassment. What I remember is kindness.

Nobody was mocking my unfortunate dinner date when she was “stuck” in the bathroom. And the people who have coached me on how to refine my language skills over the years have almost always done so gently.

Everyone, I think, was trying to help.

If you’ve spent time living in another language, you’ve probably got your own cringeworthy stories. I’d be thrilled to hear about the most memorable ones in the comments below.

Actual penne (Rummo archives)

These shorter Dispatch pieces appear every other Tuesday, in the weeks between the long-form features. Come back next week for another full-length essay.

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