Another book bites the dust
SAD to see that the phrasebook has had its day now that your smartphone has handy translation apps available at the prod of a finger. In a survey by the British Council more than 60 per cent of 16 to 34-year-olds said they used apps while only 39 per cent relied on a printed phrasebook.
Mind you I can’t remember the last time I used a phrasebook or indeed saw anyone else using one. I am lucky to have a daughter who speaks various languages so I like to take her on my travels, plonking her in front of me like a ventriloquist’s dummy to do the talking. But if she’s unavailable I simply shout and point as is traditional.
The joy of the old school phrasebook was the surreal nature of the phrases deemed essential for the well-prepared traveller. The one that everyone knows (partly because Dirk Bogarde used it for the title of his 1977 autobiography) is “My postillion has been struck by lightning” – an unfortunate but highly unlikely turn of events considering the rarity of postillions and the vanishingly small chance of the poor chaps being felled by a lightning bolt.
This phrase is also mentioned in an hilarious essay called There’s No Place Like Home which appeared in the New Yorker magazine in 1937 written by the American humorist James Thurber who came across an English to French phrasebook in a second-hand bookshop in London.
The first phrase he mentions, “Porter, here is my baggage” (“Porteur, voici mes baggages”) makes me – in the dismal age of the wheelie carry-on bag – weak with nostalgia and longing for a time when there were indeed porters to take care of your luggage who could be summoned in such a grand manner. Porters are now as uncommon as postillions, I find. Thurber continues to flick through the book, his imagined travellers beset by all manner of worrisome events.
They lose keys, gloves, umbrellas; they are struck down with assorted ailments and injuries; they encounter crime and unpleasant individuals (always a risk in foreign parts); their hotel rooms are not up to scratch – too hot, too cold, no towels. All in all, says Thurber, “the note of frenzied disintegration, so familiar to all travellers abroad, is sounded”.
JUST for fun I looked up some phrasebook phrases and each one could be the start of either a thriller or a farce. Example: “Are you fond of bagpipes?” In what circumstances would one ask such a thing? And think of the awkwardness that would follow if the answer was “No”.
Another: “The fishermen are ready now”. Ready for what? Were they lazy fishermen who had taken an unnecessarily long time to get ready? Or were they preparing for some perilous fishing, like catching Jaws?
Another: “Let’s go hunt for some wild onions”. Was there ever a more romantic invitation than that?