Hook You And Everyone Who Looks Like You.

While down in Aruba, the families Berne and Bianculli would get into great discussions over the dinner table. Whether this had something to do with the amount of wine we consumed remains a mystery, but the conversations were always lots and lots of fun. One night we got started on the subject of languages (by the way, the official language of Aruba is Papiamento, a fascinating amalgamation of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and several African languages), and I relayed a story from my days overseas. I do so again for your reading pleasure (as well as for my own curiosity about writing the story down rather than telling it).

When I moved to Japan, I had to set up my apartment - there, most places have nothing in them when you move in, so I had to buy a fridge, a heater, a toilet seat (heated!)... but one obvious purchase was a phone. Now, as I explained in this post, the Japanese have no 'f' sound in their language. The closest they have is the 'h' sound. Therefore, when they try to pronounce a foreign word containing the letter f (e.g., fuel), it often results in a h/f sound - it might come out as "hfuel." It's confusing for Japanese (much like the r/l dilemma (diremma?)), and conversely when writing in English they sometimes don't know which letter to use. Additionally, the "oo" sound (e.g. 'food') is often written by the Japanese as simply 'u'. Makes sense, right? Sounds the same. Lastly, there are many words in the English language that end with -ck rather than -vowel+k. Truck is not truk, back is not bak, you get the picture. However, there are many English words that end in -ook (e.g. book, crook) and this can be confusing to many Japanese people when trying to figure out whether to use a c or not.

So the upshot of this was as follows: when I bought my phone, the instructions were to 'hook the phone,' showing me how to put the phone back on the base. Given the above linguistics lesson, it should not have surprised me that the instructions read:

"Fuck the phone."

Needless to say, this was by far the best thing ever. It kept me laughing for days on end. Can you imagine?? "Fuck the phone." These were the funniest words I'd read since my junior year of college, when there was a guy named Sukdith Poonjestical on my floor (not kidding) and the names were posted on the doors. But anyway, thus ends the story about hooking my phone. So next time when you want to swear, just think "hook 'em!"