Since they’re raised bilingually, they often tend to drop into their own Germanic dialect, though they try to avoid it when outsiders are around for politeness’s sake. But one day at a housebuilding site they didn’t happen to notice a non-Mennonite woman standing nearby until they’d been conversing for a while. When my father’s friend apologized to the woman, she said something to the effect of, “Oh, that’s all right. I understand why you’d want to talk about *that* so nobody else could understand.”

My Dad’s friend was puzzled, until it came out that, among the other syllables of their language, the woman had heard them discussing a measurement or quantity involving six of something. “Six” in German is “sechs,” and pronounced like “sex”.

I still don’t know if my Dad’s friend ever managed to convince her of what “sechs” really meant. :)

What funnel? asked Stephen.
—The funnel through which you pour the oil into your lamp.
—That? said Stephen. Is that called a funnel? Is it not a tundish?
—What is a tundish?
—That. The … funnel.
—Is that called a tundish in Ireland? asked the dean. I never heard the word in my life.
—It is called a tundish in Lower Drumcondra, said Stephen, laughing, where they speak the best English.
[...]

Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man.

That generation of Corolla came out in ’83, and the hair is a 70s hangover.

That is definitely not a description we would have used in our house, so we asked her to repeat herself.  After hearing it many times, it was clear we weren’t misunderstanding her.  As I started to ask where she had heard such a thing, she said, “you know, he does this!” and took a bow. 

After bowing a few more times, we realized she meant the TIVO mascot character that hops and takes a bow when you boot up the unit.

Good times.

Talk about a “phew” moment. . . .

I’m not sure but it seemed like Mel Gibson may have been hamming up the accent a bit for Mad Max since it’s set in the sticks – his accent was not quite so strong in Gallipoli or The Year of Living Dangerously (both came out after Road Warrior, though).

Being familiar with the Vietnamese people that live there, I understand why they do it. They aren’t all outright racists; perhaps xenophobes is more fair. They choose to live in an area that is almost all Vietnamese people for a reason – they don’t want to deal with other people (and often their English isn’t perfect). And obviously not everyone is like that – I’d guess that the vast majority don’t care. But for the plenty that do care, in the end it’s probably best that they put stuff like that in their ads for rooms for rent – it means that I don’t have to deal with them, and I don’t have to waste time going to see their room for rent only to be treated rudely (which happened several times when I was looking for a place to live for a while last year – I eventually rented a room from a nice older Vietnamese lady with poor English who seemed wary of me at first but was always nice to me).

Generally speaking, I am probably among very few white males in the US who experiences racism with any regularity, since I spend so much time in Little Saigon. I’m still obviously overall in a position of privilege, and other than being treated rudely occasionally it doesn’t really affect me. But I treat Vietnamese racists the same way I treat white racists I’ve known… I just don’t have time for them.