My wife worked with special needs children for many years, some with language difficulties, so she learned rudimentary sign language and she would teach me on occasion a few signs. However, the only sign that stuck with me is “I have to go potty”, which I think if you are going to learn a single phrase in a foreign language, is a pretty important phrase to know. I reciprocated by teaching her a little Spanish, and although she doesn’t speak it, I have a suspicion that she understood my phone conversations with my parents more than she let on.

 

Being fluent in two languages makes one realize how fluid concepts may be, and how different languages imbue what we think of as the same idea with different nuances. My favorite example is to consider the two Spanish verbs for love. One can say “I love you” as “Yo te amo” or else as “Yo te quiero.” The first version invokes the pure, romantic love of Dante toward Beatrice, how a lover is incomplete without the other. The second version is a more direct acknowledgment of need or want. Someone hungry is going to “querer” food, but only a glutton is going to “amar” food.

 

Sometimes the subtleties cross languages. When one leaves a profession, as in voluntarily due to age or length of service, we say that the person retires. This word also conjures the concept of removal, to go away, as in “Gentlemen, after dinner, let us retire to the smoking room.” I wonder whether the juxtaposition of the two uses of the same word has led those retiring from a profession to feel like they are now to “retire to Florida,” where they should reminisce about their career the way those gentlemen reminisce about that great meal.

 

Its word origin is the Middle French word for withdrawal. Yuck!

 

Contrast this with the equivalent word in Spanish, “jubilarse.” First of all, it is a reflexive verb, meaning that it is something one does to oneself, as in “I made myself retired, or I decided to retire.” It seems to provide a level of control of the situation missing in the English form. More importantly, it has an interesting word origin, which I think also colors its meaning. “Jubilarse” shares the same word history as “jubilee” and “jubilation.” If you track the etymology far enough it comes from the Hebrew word for ram. It invokes the ram’s horn or shofar that is now associated with the Jewish High Holy Days, but back in Biblical times was also intoned to declare the arrival of the Jubilee every 50 years. I presume that in those ancient times you were done herding sheep after 50 years and you got a full pension, whatever that was.

 

You may recall that a ram’s horn also was sounded to call the Israelites to war, and its roar even knocked down the walls of Jericho. To leave your current profession in Spanish conjures not a coda, a concluding scene in one’s life, where we are to wax nostalgic about our so-called productive years. It is not about those good meals

in a long-gone dining room. Instead, it is a transition to the outdoors, to smell its fresh air and look in the distance toward another castle to conquer that will hold yet another dining (and smoking) room.

 

Plus, what better way to let your neighbors know that you are finally withdrawing from your 401k rather than contributing to it than by climbing to your rooftop and sounding a ram’s horn? Sounds good to me.