Dave Barry - Bad Habits

“Hawaii Five-O” and Americans would think they were extremely enlightening.

So the trick is to use American grammar, which is simple, but talk with a British accent, which is impressive. This technique is taught at all your really snotty private schools, where the kids learn to sound like Elliot Richardson. Remember Elliot? He sounded extremely British, and as a result he got to be Attorney General, Secretary of State, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and Vice President at the same time.

You can do it, too. Practice in your home, then approach someone on the street and say: “Tally-ho, old chap. I would consider it a great honour if you would favour me with some spare change.” You’re bound to get quick results.

One of the most useless classes I ever took in high school, ranking right up there with calculus, was French. I took several years of French, and I learned hundreds of phrases, not one of which I would ever actually want to say to anybody. For example, my French teachers insisted that when I met a French person I should say “Comment allez-vous?” It turns out that this means “How do you go?” which is not the kind of thing you say when you want to strike someone as being intelligent. Your average French person already thinks most Americans are idiots, and you’re not going to improve his opinion much if you barge up to him on some Paris street and start spewing high school French phrases:

YOU: Comment allez vous? (“How do you go?”)

FRENCH PERSON: Je vais A pied, evidentment. Vous devez avoir les cerveaux dune truite. (“I go on foot, obviously. You must have the brains of a trout.”)

YOU: est la bibliothque? (“Where is the library?”)

FRENCH PERSON: Partez, s’il vous plait. J’ai un fusil. (“Please go away. I have a gun.”)

My wife didn’t do any better in high school French. She learned to say “Je me suis casse la jambe” (“I have broken my leg”) and “Elle nest pas jolie” (“She is not pretty”). What on earth is she supposed to do with these phrases? I mean, suppose she does go to France and break her leg:

MY WIFE: Je Me suis casse la jambe. (“I have broken my leg.”)

FRENCH BYSTANDERS: C’est dommage. (“What a pity.”)

MY WIFE: Elle nest pas jolie. (“She is not pretty.”)

FRENCH BYSTANDERS: Bien, excusez-nous pour vivre. Vous netes pas un grand prix vous-meme. (“Well, excuse us for living. You are no great prize yourself.”)

My wife would never get an ambulance that way. She’d be lucky if the bystanders didn’t spit on her.

Despite the fact that the teacher insisted on making me speak like a fool, I stuck with high school French, because at the time the only alternative was Latin, which is even more worthless. For one thing, everybody who speaks Latin is dead. For another thing, all you ever read in Latin class is Caesar’s account of the Gallic Wars, in which Caesar drones on and on about tramping around Gaul. These had to be the dullest wars in history, which is why finally the Romans got so bored that they let the empire collapse and quit speaking Latin. In fact, they gave up on spoken language altogether, and today their descendants communicate by means of hand gestures.

When I got to college, I briefly considered taking Chinese or Russian, but abandoned this notion when I discovered that the Russians and the Chinese use Communist alphabets. I also rejected German, because it is too bulky. For example, the German word for “cat” is

“einfuhrungaltfriesischenspraakuntworterbuchgegenwart.” It can take up to two days to order lunch in German.

The result of all this is that I know very little of any foreign language, and what I do know is either useless or embarrassing. Most Americans are in the same situation. Fortunately, you don’t really need another language, because, as you know if you have ever traveled abroad, virtually all foreign persons speak English. In fact, I sometimes suspect that there are no foreign languages, that foreign persons really speak English all the time and just pretend to speak foreign languages so they can amuse themselves by conning dumb American tourists into saying things like “How do you go?”

So if you plan to travel abroad, you should not waste your time learning some foreign language that could well turn out to be fraudulent. Instead, you should practice pronouncing, in a very loud, clear voice, certain useful English phrases for travelers. Here are the main ones:

“Do you speak English?”

“Thank God. Where can I find a bathroom?”

“Is that one of those bathrooms where you wind up standing on some street corner in a structure that offers no more privacy than a beach umbrella?”

“Thank God. Will the bathroom have a squat female attendant who will watch my every move lest I leave without giving her a tip, even though the bathroom has obviously not been cleaned once since it was built by Visigoths more than twelve thousand years ago?”

“Thank God. Say, you speak pretty good English, for a foreign person.”

These phrases will take care of your basic needs abroad, and the fact that you have taken the time to learn to pronounce them loudly and clearly will leave a lasting impression on your foreign hosts.

We should all be grateful that we have mathematics. For example, without mathematics, it would be almost impossible to figure out what size tip you should leave. Even with mathematics, this is very difficult. The mathematical formula for tipping, which was discovered by Sir Isaac Newton, states that the tip equals 15 percent of the bill, but unfortunately the bill is always $17.43, and nobody has the vaguest idea what 15 percent of $17.43 is. The finest brains in the country have been working on this problem for years, using large computers, and they have yet to come up with an answer. So most of us wind up tipping a random amount of money, usually $3.50, which we increase slightly if the waiter performs an extra service, such as not spitting in the food. And that’s just one of the ways we use mathematics in our everyday lives.

Mathematics got started in ancient Egypt, when the ancient Egyptians discovered the numbers three and eight. They used these numbers to develop the mathematical formulas for the pyramids, which were actually supposed to be spherical. Eventually people in other countries discovered more numbers, and today we have more than ten thousand of them.

After the discovery of numbers, the next major stride in mathematics came when the ancient Greeks discovered the hypotenuse. The Greeks used the hypotenuse to manufacture right triangles for export tO other countries. Included free with each triangle was a copy of the famous Pythagorean Theorem (named for its discoverer, Bob Theorem), which states: “Some of the squares of the opposite sides are equal to 14.6

percent of your grossly adjusted annual unearned interest, unless there are two or more runners on base at the time.” To this very day, children memorize the Pythagorean Theorem in school, which accounts for their behavior.

The ancient Greeks made so much money with the right triangle that they developed a whole line of mathematical items, such as the rhomboid, the pentagon, the diameter, the parabola, the hyperbole, the irrational number, the cube, the really deranged number, and the square root. In fact, the ancient Greeks developed all the really popular items; everything developed since then has failed miserably. Take algebra. I don’t know who dreamed up algebra, but whoever it was obviously had a lot of time to waste, because it is utterly useless. In algebra class, day after day, the teacher would write something like this on the blackboard:

4x + 2 = 14

Then he would ask us what x stood for. It turns out that it stood for 3, but how the hell were we supposed to know that? He was the one who dreamed up x in the first place, and it seemed grossly unfair for him to expect us to know what he was thinking of at the time. And to make matters worse, the next day he would have x equal some other number, such as 4, depending on his mood. I spent an entire year in algebra class, and to this day I don’t have the faintest notion what x stands for, which is why I hardly ever use it for anything.