Shanghai Bob

I was talking with a friend of a friend in Borough Market’s Monmouth Cafe before I left, and she mentioned that there is no word for “guilt” in Tibetan.

That may be, but just because a language doesn’t have a single word for a thing is no indication that it doesn’t exist in the culture.  Take the Germans.  If you ask a German what the opposite of smile is, most likely he or she will say “to wrinkle the forehead” (Die Stirn runzeln) or “to make a sad face” (Ein trauriges Gesicht machen).  Yet Germans love to frown, especially in disapproval.

My flight from Heathrow to Frankfurt was delayed by an hour, so I missed my connection to Basel/Freiburg.  When I got to the Lufthansa desk in Frankfurt, they said the next flight was the following morning at 9:00.  I asked about a train.  [Frown] The clerk called, chatted with someone, put the phone down and told me that the last train was leaving in just ten minutes and suggested I wait until the morning.  I said I wanted to make the train.  [Frown] He hand-wrote a train voucher and put me in the immigration queue.  The first immigration officer told me I was in the wrong line [Frown].  The second immigration officer told me my brand-new replacement passport was invalid [Frown]:  I hadn’t signed it.  I ran to the train and handed my voucher to the attendant.  He said, [Frown] “I don’t think we can accept this.”

Not having a word for something in your language doesn’t mean you don’t understand or use the concept.  Germans frown.  Tibetans likely experience guilt.  And though they had to borrow a word for it, Anglo-Saxons definitely take pleasure in the suffering of others.

As I spent two of my precious ten minutes before the train left waiting patiently on the escalator behind several elderly travelers with large luggage, a less patient person forced his way up past all of us, smacking the old folks with his laptop case as he went.  When I got to the top of the escalator, I ran down the corridor, with Laptop Guy far ahead.  At the track flyover, I saw the sign and stairs for Track 5 hidden on the left.  He had gone straight.  I considered calling out to him, but I didn’t.  I went left down the stairs and on to the train just 30 seconds before it left.  As the train pulled out I smiled with Schadenfreude, then immediately felt guilty.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 at 12:39 pm and is filed under linguistics, travel.