The beauty of learning a language like Arabic is that you never know when you’re going to mistakenly insult somebody. It’s kind of like Dave Barry’s experiences with Japanese, where he found that accidentally putting the wrong stroke on a Kanji character could turn “library” into “sex with ostriches.”

Much to the amusement of our instructor, we often make these gaffs. One classmate meant to say “employee” (موظفة /mooaath’faa/) and managed to spit out “sexy” (موثيرة/mutheeraa/). Yesterday, we discovered that we were hanging on to one syllable of the Arabic version of the name Jasmine in our practice dialogues.

The dialogue called for the line “Thanks, Jasmine!” — /shokran, yaa yasmina/. What we were saying was closer to /shokran, yaa yaa semeena/, which translates (albeit badly) into “Thanks, fatty.”