One thing I love this week: Mixed languages

“One thing I love” is something I did at an old job to try energize the morgue that was our team Slack channel. Everyone was focusing so heavily on work, which, in hindsight, probably makes sense in that context. If anything, I was under-focusing on work.

But I noticed people were becoming overly stressed out by inconsequential problems and allowing the work to dominate their very existence. Hence I came up with an idea for a slack channel called “One Thing I Love Today.” The basic premise was to share one thing I was grateful for or excited about that day, unrelated to work.

Several people in the channel were too far gone down the marketing rabbit hole and failed to grasp this concept. Pretty sure someone said they were grateful that the new color gradient for the website got approved. But hey, you can’t help everyone.

Essentially the channel was a micro version of this blog. I wanted to get people out of their day to day grind and make them smile or be happy for a brief moment. Real pithy stuff.

I’ll try to do this weekly on Mondays to help you start your work week off on a positive note. Only reason I didn’t do it until Wednesday this week is because I’m in Greece and my body just now figured out what day/time it is.

Also credit to me for blogging on vacation. Hero shit.

But speaking of Greece, one thing I love this week is…

Mixed Languages

I don’t mean something like Alsatian which is literally a mix of two languages, or whatever Dutch-Spanish hybrid they speak in Aruba.

I’m talking about when someone is speaking their native, non-English language and there’s an English word that isn’t translatable in said language so they just say it in English in the middle of the sentence.

If you don’t understand what I mean by that confusing, run-on of a sentence, here’s an example from the show Shoresy (great watch btw). Fast forward to the 35 second mark.

It can either be a proper noun like a team name i.e. Boston Red Sox, or just some weird colloquial slang word that doesn’t translate into other languages.

(Btw any Spanish teachers out there, stop teaching kids to say “Las Medias Rojas” when referring to the Sox. Literally don’t think I’ve ever heard any Spanish speaker refer to them that way).

Anyways, this idea came to me because I was listening to two bartenders at our hotel speaking to each other in Greek. I don’t speak more than a few words of Greek so I’m roughly translating here:

“Greek stuff, Greek stuff, something about tzatziki, Greek stuff, In english: SHUT UP, Greek stuff, Greek stuff, gyros.”

The randomly placed ‘shut up’ in there was incredible and a surprising delight. There’s definitely a Greek word for shut up though so maybe they were trying to send me a not so subtle hint. Regardless I was tickled.