How to screw up in Arabic

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 23:30:00 +0000

Twenty-seven doesn’t feel old enough to have spent a very long time doing anything, and accounting for a few decades’ worth of life still seems like something too grown-up for me to ever be capable of. But, looking back now on my 20s, I realize I really did achieve something: I spent almost a whole decade failing to learn Arabic -- really trying, and really failing, for 10 years.

9/11 happened when I was 16. Since I'm British, it didn’t affect me like it did the Americans I met later. Even now, it feels strange saying it at the start of a story, like it isn’t mine enough to mention. Of course it seeped into everyone’s lives in the end, and England was no different – the London bombings, the Bertie Wooster bumbling of so much of it. There were distinct notes of Britishness to the entire decade: the carving up of other people’s countries, those inquiries into the war on terror’s illegality that, quite Britishly, came to nothing, and how we hoped the awkwardness of having stumbled into several wars would just politely subside. Whoops-a-daisy, like Hugh Grant says when he’s playing British for American audiences.

Salon.com > Heather McRobie

How to screw up in Arabic