Admittedly, most English-language learners are concerned with the nuts and bolts of it. Until the 1990s, students of English in Italy based their language skills on a single unarguable certainty: the pen is on the table. Whose pen it was, what it was doing there and whether or not to use it to write something worthy was of concern to no one. The pen is on the table; we know not why. Everyone agrees: the third-person ‘s’ is as slippery as a buttered eel and whether ‘her’ refers to a man or a woman is nothing more than a mosquito-like annoyance. Those learning Italian very possibly had it even worse: Lei is ‘she,’ but if said to mean ‘you,’ then it can be both masculine and the feminine. Table is female, unless it is a workbench table, in which case it’s tavolo. Needless to say, some of us simply survived it. Others patented the pain and now write bi-weekly columns on culture and language.
Granted, it’s summer. And those who believe that linguistic secrets should be divulged only when wearing tweed and drinking bergamot tea might have to bear with me for another line or two. My feeling is this: grammatical errors are more than stray words meowing away down by our ankles. If given proper attention, they’ll lead us to where the food fries and the poets dance-to the center of cultural understanding, that is-to the very core of the cavern.
Some errors are ever-present, for example. There is not an Italian student on this side of the Rubicon who has not been late for a lesson at some point. In part, they can be justified. Italian classrooms tick on their own time-and l’ora accademica begins 15 minutes after the scheduled time. But what interests me today is one person in particular whose tardiness defies all clocks in the country even the academic ones. Summer courses have begun and Mauro slides into his chair each day as if he fears it will soon be pulled out from under him. I believe he has a time-based disorder. The man treats minutes as if they were peanuts to be munched on with leisure, and he speaks of bygone centuries as if they were as close as the neighborhood bakery that sells bomboloni on Sundays.
‘I’m sorry for the late,’ Mauro told me the other morning, with a grin too sheepish for apology.
‘You mean, you’re sorry for the delay,’ I corrected.
‘Yes. I have been in late all day.’
‘Late, not in late,’ I corrected again.
Mauro was not too interested in the difference. He needs English to talk to other international colleagues who don’t speak it all that well either. As long as he gets the general concept across, he is contento. As for me, contentedness requires a lot more thinking. Why is ‘late’ an adjective in English-a personal state of being, comparable to ‘happy’ or ‘rude’ or ‘confused?’ And why is it a noun in Italian, like a package you pick up on the way to a last-minute party? Experience a three-hour delay in this country and it means you’re in ritardo-stuck inside a space whose suction is as powerful as quicksand. It has nothing to do with you personally. You are not late; it’s just something that happened to you. Deep inside that language cavern, there must be something good.
As for me, it got me thinking about tardiness and the words Italians use to excuse it. My all-time favorite is ho avuto un imprevisto. How thrilling to live in a country where all time-based inconveniences can be dismissed with the enigmatic flair of ‘I’ve had an unforeseen.’ If you’ve lived here less than a year, you may still be interested in what exactly the unpredicted thing was. Veteran expats, however, don’t have a smidgen of curiosity left running through their veins. Whatever is unforeseen must be taken as truth. Everything is unexpected. Second in the classifica, I’m sure you’ll agree, is ho avuto un contrattempo. I got caught in a situation that was ‘against time’-an enemy to the clock. The expression is a sack that can hold every justification invented since Einstein first assured us that time is relative.
‘What do English people say when they want to say they had a contrattempo?’ Mauro wanted to know.
‘They say “I was held up.”‘
‘Held up?’ he asked surprised, ‘What, like in the air?’
‘Well, yes, I guess so,’ I nodded, unsure. ‘Like in the air … We also use the expression when someone holds you at gunpoint and steals all your money.’
He grinned. ‘So you mean English people are that serious about time.’
I shrugged. ‘Time is money, after all.’
Mauro settled into his seat. ‘It’s true,’ he mused. ‘Only the delays are for free.’
The class laughed, and I was finally content.
