Fun with English

When I first knew Alla, she claimed that her English improved after she’d had a glass of wine. By now, her English is pretty steady, but I got a good laugh after she had a glass of chardonnay on an empty stomach and then called the hotel operator. We’re still in Cancun, and Alla now knows a little Spanish. The operator answers the phone in Spanish, so Alla responded “Buenos dias… Buenas tardes.” Realizing it was after 6 pm, she added “Buenas noches.”

From there she proceeded to offer the operator a room number ten less than our actual room and breathlessly intoned, “We have a lamp burned down.” English is the hotel operator’s second language too, and I feared she’d get the wrong impression and call the fire department. I figured that the simplest way to correct any misunderstanding would be to make sure the operator knew Alla was talking about a light bulb.

“Light bulb,” I said.

“Oh,” Alla said to the operator. “We have a light bowl burned down.”

I offered more information to Alla: “We have a light bulb burned out.”

Alla improved her report, saying, “We have a light bowl burned out.” Following with a little spate of general confusion, Alla hung up the phone. We hadn’t gotten to the part about our actual room number, but I trusted that the operator had caller ID, so I let it slide as we began to wait in semi-darkness.

We ate bowls of soup, but nobody came. Discussing what had happened, Alla suggested that perhaps people with hoses and water buckets were right now pounding on the door of room 505. I decided it might be best if I were to call the operator myself. I think the operator already understood what we wanted, and she said that the maintenance department would come soon. It all ended very nicely, but as I’ve discovered when making a fool of myself in Russian, the structures and concepts in one language don’t always map directly to another.