Linguistic False Friends: 05 (Backside) (Pakistan)

 

At the end of the 37-day film shoot (following an American multi-millionaire amateur motorcyclist from Shanghai along the Silk Route/Road to Xinjiang), we crossed over to Pakistan to catch our plane back to London from Islamabad.

    The first night in Pakistan would've been in Gilgit, but a landslide forced us to divert to a different location for the night.

    The next day, as we sat in the long queue of vehicles waiting for the road to be cleared, our driver said to the motorcyclist's girlfriend (who'd come out to join him for that stretch, having been banned from following us on the whole shoot, as it was strictly work), "Memsahib, the water you were drinking last night at the hotel -- it is from the backside of this mountain."

(Pakistan, 1988)

Linguistic False Friends: 04 (You're not listening) (Pakistan)

 

Listening to a BBC Radio 4 programme one day, I heard the Pakistani interviewee (in Pakistan) saying, when the connection broke:  "You’re not listening."  What he meant was, "Can you hear me?"

Dysfunctional communications: 02 (Asking for sage) (London)

I received a text from a Malaysian:  "Can you see if there's any sage on the allotment?"

    I've been helping out a few people on their plots at a large allotment site (176 plots of varying sizes) in east London, weeding and watering.  In return, I get to help myself to the veg and fruit, which I share with friends.

    This Malaysian has been making special requests like, "Can you see if there're any conference pears / Victoria plums?"  It's easy enough for fruit, as it's usually half a dozen or so.  (More than that would be a bit heavy to carry, e.g.)

    The sage request, however, is a different matter, given that it's a herb which can be dried and stored for future use, so she might be wanting 20 or 30 leaves.

    With so little information to go on, and no reply to my text asking for clarification, I went ahead and worked on the most obvious assumption, and picked half a dozen leaves.

    Well, it turned out that she actually wanted the sage not for cooking but for planting, so the six leaves were the wrong offering.  She wanted sprigs of a certain length, with stems of a certain thickness to ensure they'd grow.

    Why on earth didn't she say so in the first place??!!  Just one text spelling it out would've saved a lot of wasted time and effort:  "Can you see if there's any sage on the allotment? If there's any, can I have 5 or 6 sprigs x inches long, with the stems at least the thickness of the finger to ensure healthy growth."

    An equivalent would be asking me, "Can you see if there's any beef at the butcher's?"  (A Tuesday group Mandarin student suggested a first response, "So what?")  What kind of beef:  stewing beef, minced beef, brisket, steak?  If she wants me to get her some, I'll need to know how much: a pound, a kilo?  And so on.  Spelling it out in the first place would save a lot of to-ing and fro-ing.  Pointing this out makes me the baddie.

    This is someone who does not spare time and effort going over the same story repeatedly, sometimes at the same sitting.  I can understand the need to repeat a story if the telling is for letting off steam, but not spelling out the details when one's needs are so specific is simply inefficient communication. 

(London, 2026)