If I had it to do over again, I would’ve taken Spanish in high school or college. Not only would I then have the obvious benefit of being able to hit on J. Lo in two different languages, I would also be able to help out the occasional lost non-English speaker. Telling someone how to manuever the complexities of transfers at Rosslyn is difficult enough without a language barrier, but yesterday I tried to help a guy who asked, “Donde esta cor how?” I think he was asking how to get to Court House, but I have no idea, really. He also showed a card with an address on 14th St in DC, but said that he wasn’t going there. Right, that’s not confusing at all.
After several minutes of gesticulating, I think he got the point: Orange line, this platform, one stop. My limited Spanish vocabulary stops short of colors, so I couldn’t really convey which train to take, except by indicating the number two. Yes, I suck at charades. My train, the blue line, arrived first, so I don’t know how he fared, so to speak. He may still be wandering the tunnels of the DC subway system. Good luck, amigo. Vaya con dios.
Yes, because it was so important to have a high verbal score to get accepted to G-Tech! Why, the institution of abstruse and recondite sciences into which I matriculated would hardly have countenanced one whose scholastic pursuits were anything more diminutive than the complete assimilation of the highest tier of prodigious didactic thought regarding linguistics.
Heh-heh. I know that’s not Latin.