ROTFESL

By Todd Stadler · Saturday, September 17, 2005 5:14pm

My friend Gerry has a wife, Wai Yee, who is Malaysian. Though they met and married while she was working in America, she is currently back in Malaysia, wrapping up her job, with the intent of moving to the States permanently in a little while.

So it was that while she was visiting Portland for a short trip this summer, someone asked Wai Yee, "So, are you here for good now?"

To which Wai Yee replied, with a wonderfully straight face, "No, this time for evil."

Which makes me wonder if one way to consistently be funny is simply to find a language's idiomatic expressions confusing or odd.

I've certainly done my part to amuse people in a foreign (for me) language. One time in Mexico, I tried to talk to someone about cogiendo un tren — which five years of high school Spanish and several years of forgetting same led me to believe had something to do with catching a train.

As it turns out, the action I mentioned performing with a train that I actually conveyed to that surprised Mexican was not a subject that any of my Spanish teachers had ever brought up {clears throat}.