Language Blunders
May 11th, 2007 by Glenn
Some of the most popular missionary stories are the ones that deal with language blunders – either our own or someone else’s. Here are a few of the ones I collected over the years. To view more examples, click here. And of course, if you would like to add your own, please feel free.
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An American mission president assigned to the Philippines in the 80’s had just stood at the pulpit to greet a Filipino congregation. He wanted to impress the members by greeting them in their native tongue, but he mixed up the words mabuhay (a common greeting of long life and prosperity) and mabaho (meaning to be explained in the translation). He looked across the audience and loudly proclaimed, “Mabaho! Mabaho kayong lahat!” He thought he had said, “Long Life! Long Life to you all!” But what he had actually said was, “Stinky! You are all stinky!”
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I served in the France Marseille Mission from May ‘97 to November ‘98. Many French words sound the same as in English, so you can say an English word with a French accent and be right. Unfortunately, the verb ‘blesser’ does not mean ‘to bless,’ but ‘to hurt.’ In the MTC prayers we often ended up saying “please hurt our teacher with the Holy Ghost.” My native trainer told a story about one of her companions who was tired of using the same phrases over and over again in prayers. She had just decided to be more creative when she was asked to give the closing prayer in sacrament meeting. Instead of saying “L’amour que nous avons ici” (the love we have here), she ended up saying “L’amour que nous faisons ici” (the sex we have here). Needless to say, the congregation couldn’t contain themselves.
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One of the funnier blunders that I remember was a missionary trying to state that we can’t live with heavenly father if we have sin in our life, and that’s why He sent Jesus Christ. However instead of “pecado” for sin, he accidentally said “pescado” (fish).
Another missionary wanted to say that God has a body of flesh and bones (carne y huesos) but essentially said that God has a body of steak and eggs (carne y huevos).
A missionary trying to say that he wanted french-fries (papas fritas) said he wanted fried Popes (Papas fritos).
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Cognates are words in Spanish that are alike or similar to the word represented in English like: color (color), piano (piano), urgent (urgencia - emergency)…unfortunately not all words which sound like they should be a cognates are such. Invariably you will hear of the Elder (or Sister) who stood up one afternoon in Sacrament meeting at the invitation of the Branch President or Bishop to speak or share his testimony and began with “Estory embarazada,” (thinking it a cognate for embarrassed - it is actually the word for pregnant) and finishing the sentence with “and it’s all the Bishop’s fault” (for asking them to speak).
These are great stories. It makes me wish I had one to share. my favorite is the bishop making them “pregnant”. By the way who is that HOT Elder on this page? I bet he’s married now. At least he should be if he served a good mission.
Two come to mind:
1. In Hungary there was an Elder McDougall (who later became infamous as the BYUSA president who had to promote the ridiculous and short-lived “Cougars Don’t Cut Corners” program at BYU). His first Sunday in Hungary he got up and introduced himself and got a shocked silence. His name, it turns out, sounded very much like megdögöl, a rather crass sexual term. So he had to call himself “elder MacDow-gall” the rest of his mission.
2. Not really a blunder, but a number of missionaries replaced the polite greeting Kezét csókólom (lit. ‘I kiss your hand’) with Kezét csonkólom ‘I cut off your hand.’ It was a way of pulling one over on speakers of a very difficult language who assumed that it was an innocent mistake on the missionaries’ part. For just a moment the missionaries could be in the position of the linguistically competent person dealing with the other who doesn’t understand something
As a folklorist I find the second one more interesting, even if it is a less commonly told type. It shows the often passive-agressive relationship missionaries can develop with the people they serve, and how it can be let out in a harmless fashion. As missionaries are surrounded daily by an indifferent, or even hostile populace, I would expect that similar ways of venting and turning the tables on the populace would be found almost everywhere, but perhaps seldom admitted to because of the recognition that these sorts of things aren’t part of the “warm and fuzzy” idealized version of “the best two years of my life.”
What follows is actually an example of folk song, although I believe it supports your sugestiong that missionaries have a complicated love-hate relatiosnhip with the people they are trying to serve/convert.
I remember a certain nameless slightly-cocky missionary singing a version of the Mr Roger’s song after being “kekkoed” (no thank you) and cussed out at the door by a young Japanese tattooed Yakuza in Hiroshima. After singing “It’s a beatuiful day in the neighborhood” to the guy’s face (and having the door slammed in it) he made up his own version as he walked away with his companion. “It’s such a good, feeling, a very good feeling, the feeling you know, that I’ll be back, when the end is here, and you’ll be damned to hell. And you’ll have things, you’ll want to talk about. I’ll — kekko — you.”
The lines between loving service and frustrating ambivilance can be very blurry. I wonder if any others had experiences like this.
One other one occured to me. In Hungarian there are two letters, a and á, which are very difficult for Americans to consistently differentiate, both in hearing and speaking. There are two words in Hungarian that differ only in this letter (such pairs are called “minimal pairs”): szar, as semi-vulgar term for excrement, and szár ‘plant stem.’ When the latter occured in scriptural contexts, many missionaries would go out of their way to avoid saying it rather than risk saying the former. So they would have Hungarians read the passages with those words or would figure out circumlocutions to get around it, such as using the word törzs ‘(tree) trunk, tribe.’ So there were missionaries who went around talking about “grass trunks” instead of “grass stems.” For similar reasons many missionaries would avoid saying the English word bus because it sounded quite similar to a very crass Hungarian swear-word.
Finally, since I’m airing the dirty linguistic laundry of Hungarian missionaries, missionaries quite frequently said (in English) “go to France” in situations where you would expect to here people say “get lost” or “blow off.” In Hungarian a somewhat crass curse is “mennjel a francba!,” which does not (directly) refer to France, despite what it sounds like (if it referred to France it would be “mennjel a franciába!”). Historically, however, it referred to the “French disease” (syphilis) and was a curse that originally meant something like “get syphilis and die.” But many missionaries found it funny to refer to France, so it was quite common for them in humorous (and not so humorous) settings to tell their companions to go to France.