Some Thoughts on the Craft of the Wise
How do you know when someone is one of the Wise?
My friend grew up speaking Polish with his immigrant grandmother. When, as an adult, he visited Poland, he wondered if people would be able to understand him.
Oh, they understood him, all right. They also laughed hysterically whenever he said anything.
He was speaking Hillbilly Polish.
My friend, a successful professional with a PhD, laughed as he told me about this.
“I never knew we were hicks,” he said, proudly.
I learned Old Norse from a man named Anatoly Lieberman, one of the most brilliant linguists that I've ever met. Born in the USSR, he spoke—not read, but spoke—seventeen different languages, both ancient and modern. He came to America because no Soviet university would hire him, so deeply-entrenched is the anti-Semitism of Russian culture.
He once told me that the quickest way to get a laugh out of a Russian audience is to say something in Ukrainian.
To the Russian ear, Ukrainian sounds like Hick Russian.
To the English-hearing ear, there's something slurred and lazy-sounding about the Slavic languages, as if the speaker can't quite be bothered to enunciate clearly. To my American ear, at least, Russian—with its broad spectrum of rubbery palatalized sounds—always sounds like English played backwards.
It's easy to make assumptions about other people based on how they sound to us.
It's rarely wise to do so.
When you meet someone who is absolutely confident that they've got everything figured out, you can be virtually certain—regardless of what they may call themselves—that you're not speaking with one of the Wise.