FOREIGNERS
“You are not taking up with a dirty foreigner?”
“He’s quite a decent fellow, though he is a foreigner.
Why do you say ‘dirty foreigner’?”
“All foreigners are dirty foreigners.”
TO the majority of Englishmen foreigners are dirty foreigners, though, of course, to Americans, one concedes the name cousin. But when you travel about in the world you soon find that in other countries we also are foreigners, perhaps even “dirty foreigners.”
“He is English?” I have heard it asked. “He’s one of these people who think they own the earth?” And all too often in Europe one hears of “vulgar Americans.”
Despite the grand international ideas of this and of preceding ages, it is just as difficult for foreigners to get on together and esteem one another and understand one another. This becomes very clear upon reading modern works of travel, and perhaps clearer still upon listening to the personal adventures of people who have been traveling unconventionally in foreign lands. What is strange to us is comic, it strikes us as a burlesque; if it irks us we think it distasteful, even wrong. We take the foreigner to task for not behaving “like a perfect gentleman,” etc.
It is largely a matter of bad manners. If manners could be improved we should more easily get into sympathy with “foreigners”; if they could be perfected there would not be any foreigners.
The language difficulty is enormous. Even if we learn to speak a foreign tongue, we are liable to make mistakes and to have a queer accent. We are at least as bad as those foreigners who come to us and say “English as she is spoke.” Mistakes in language are almost always very malapropos. Beaucoup is “much” in France, but ill-pronounced it means “little” in Italian (poco). The word for Thursday in Serbian is slang for sixpence in Russian. An American lady wishing to ingratiate herself with some Germans said she felt as if in Paradise; but the word paradise in German means tomato, and her friends stared at her. An acquaintance of mine, not speaking French very well, was dancing on a Paris boulevard with some midinettes. Feeling rather tired he went up to one of them and whispered in her ear, “Ma chère danseuse, je suis en couchant” so that he seemed to imply a confession that he was a pig. Two Russian Bolsheviks in London were fumbling for a doorkey outside a house at midnight. A policeman came up and asked them what they were doing.