Người hoà sắc

Every day has the potential for misunderstandings via language when you live in a foreign land and Vietnam and I are not strangers to these misunderstandings. My understanding is that Vietnamese is quite a black and white language where English has many nuances depending on how a word is said combined with the situation in which it is uttered. “I don’t care” doesn’t mean you have turned your back on humankind and “never” doesn’t quite mean never just “never” this time, my bad most times.

I love the English language and some consider me quite verbose. Why call someone a person who can’t make their mind when you can call them a ditherer. I give new words to the staff all of the time and recently they have included skullduggery, austerity, rickety, pernicious and today, ditherer. Today we had a surprising result, not only did 2 people learn a new word in English, neither of them had seen, used or been taught the Vietnamese word for ditherer, người hoà sắc, either.

Before I go further, I am using the easiest way to translate Vietnamese words into English, it’s for the English speaking readers. Have you ever worked in an office with three young ladies whose names were My (pronounced Me), Du (pronounced You) and Mai (pronounced My)? The conversation about what job everyone is doing can get quite Abbott and Costelloesque. “I told Du”, “no you didn’t, you told My”, “but that’s my job” etc., hilarity ensues.

The day finished on a bright note. For years, when local people, mainly taxi drivers have asked if I speak Vietnamese, my answer has been khong (no), mainly a blank look is received but occasionally one caught on and a stilted conversation followed. In the supermarket tonight, a Vietnamese mother (mẹ or in English mare) told her son to talk to me in English, he said no and asked me in Vietnamese did I speak Vietnamese. Being a kid, I gave him my full repertoire, “Tôi không nói tiếng Việt”. He got it and was in hysterics for the next 5 minutes that a foreigner would tell him in Vietnamese that he didn’t speak Vietnamese”. He then followed me around for the next 10 minutes asking more questions in the local lingo and was in constant fits of laughter with my replies, basic as they were. It was terrific that a young’n would use his imagination and work out what I was trying to tell him. The future is in good hands if most of his generation continues in the vein. He is definitely not a người hoà sắc.

Can you name the song that contains the word dithering?