It is almost too easy to remember situations in which communication goes awry. One great example comes from something that I feel is common, especially in Canada, where the nuance of language is “lost in translation”.

For a while, I was dating a Croatian girl whose parents spoke little to no English; so I started studying the language intensely. I had reached a point where I felt comfortable with the language. You know, that point where knowing a little can be exponentially more dangerous than knowing nothing at all.

I used what little knowledge of the language I had to the best of my ability one night before dinner. In an attempt to tell her mother that what she was cooking smelled fantastic, I expounded, in broken Croatian: “Ovo je smrdi vrlo dobro!”. Her mother looked at me like a deer looking into headlights, long enough for me to think that I had made some horrible pronunciation error that translated into some expletive. After a few moments of the “deer looking into headlights” gaze she and my former girlfriend started laughing profusely. Apparently, the direct translation of what I had said was “This STINKS really good”.

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