Around lunch time today, my Syrian co-worker called to say she’s 10 minutes away, and asked if I can wait for her so we’d eat together. I started daydreaming about the food, when she called again 5 minutes later totally panicking and saying, “فقع الدولاب!”, which in my dialect means something along the lines of: The wardrobe’s been stroke/hit, or in another context, “Someone has annoyed/frustrated the wardrobe” which I figured wouldn’t make sense at all.

So all I got was, something must have happened to the wardrobe. I was hungry and she was panicky; there was little room to understand. She said she’ll contact the insurance and call me back. And in my head I’m like, insurance? For the wardrobe? Why‘s there an insurance for that? But then she interrupted my thoughts with another call, asking if I could pick her up for she couldn’t find a cab. I made a mental happy dance, because I could finally grasp there was something wrong with the car! But a wardrobe, in the car?...

I was worried I‘d say something completely irrelevant in the middle of all that, so I gave as many short answers as I possibly could, and when I made it there, it turned out her tyre went flat! Which I would’ve panicked over a lot more on the phone if my mind hadn’t wandered off to a non-existent wardrobe, that was so unexplainably insured.

We laughed about it way too hard when I explained it to her. And it reminded me of another time when I first moved and went furniture shopping with my Lebanese friend. She said she needed (what I thought was) a kettle, yet we spent almost an hour at the refrigerators section. And as we were leaving, I asked if she forgot about the “براد” she wanted (which turned out to mean refrigerator in other dialects), and she looked at me in horror, wondering if I suffered some kind of short-term memory loss, because we had literally just done exactly that.

Ever since I moved, my life‘s been full of awkward yet interesting encounters like those. It still amazes me how one language can have so many different forms, and how the same word can have different meanings across countries and people. It will always be the one thing I never get enough of experiencing. 😁♥️

February 5, 2020