Linguistics

A few years ago I had the pleasure of going to Mexico. We stayed at a lovely resort hotel a couple hours south of Cancun. The very first night after settling in, we went to one of the hotel bars to have some fun and drinks. We weren’t at the bar more than a few minutes when a lovely couple came and sat down beside us. We immediately hit it off with them and began to have a great time together.

We started having rounds of “Tequila Boom-Booms” which are a shot of tequila, slow gin and 7-Up in a tall thin shot glass which is covered by a napkin and slammed on the bar which causes it to fizz up and you take it and quickly shoot it down. This became our drink of choice whenever we were together.

Every day we would go off and “do our own thing” but come evening we would meet up with them at the same bar and describe what adventures we had had that day to each other. We would spend the rest of the evening just having a ball, bar hoping, going dancing at the disco, whatever mischief we could find to get into together, and invariably closing down the last bar together before retiring.

Later I found out that they were on their honeymoon, and was surprised that they chose to spend so much time with us. We would even hang out together at the pool during days when we didn’t have something going on. I would have thought they would have wanted to spend time alone, as it was their honeymoon. We really did have a lot of fun together and it was very sad at the end of the week when we had to fly back home and leave them behind.

You might be wondering what is unusual about this, as people often make friends while off on vacation. We spent many hours together and really seemed to enjoy each others company, but our relationship posed one minor problem for us to overcome.

You see Antonio and Daniela were from Italy and did not speak a single word of English, and we were from the U.S. and spoke no Italian. The entire time we were together was spent “playing” a very elaborate game of charades, trying to communicate to each other. Though some things we were never able to communicate to each other, you would be surprised at just how well you can “talk” to each other if you try hard enough.

We did meet one fellow that worked for the hotel who could speak Italian and English (that is how we found out it was their honeymoon, we never could get that one across with charades). He offered to spend the week with us translating, but not for free. We declined his services because we were just having too good of a time together, with our own form of communication, and spent the rest of the week plying our charades and having a ball.

There is more than one way to communicate with people that don’t speak your language. We would never have met Antonio and Daniela if we had chosen to turn the other way that first night at the bar, just because we didn’t speak the same language...