“Love me”, “I love you”, and the Hungarian Phrase Book

A few years ago it occurred to me that, no matter what anyone was saying, they were really saying one of two things, or both. They were saying, “love me” and/or “I love you.” People complaining about the horrible (or annoying) state of their lives were saying “love me.” So was my daughter as she was pointedly saying how terribly I had misunderstood her, or my husband intimating that I wasn’t doing my share in the family equation. When my husband railed at me for how I was driving, he was saying, “I love you.” When he responded indignantly to my resisting the railing, he was saying both. So I began the experiment of translating people’s messages and receiving what they were really saying instead of their words.

A help in this was a favorite Monty Python sketch, the one about the Hungarian phrase book. In the first scene of the sketch, the news report says that the visiting Hungarians are a great nuisance because they are so obscene. It shows clips of them being carted away by police. Then in a subsequent clip, the news report says that the real culprit has been found – the publisher of a phony Hungarian phrase book that gives a false rendition of the English equivalents for basic things that a Hungarian visitor would need to be able to say. It shows the publisher being carted off by the police. In the third scene, a Hungarian visitor walks up to a counter and haltingly says, “May I fondle your buttocks?” The man behind a counter, after a quick consultation with a corrected manuscript, replies, with appropriate gestures, “Certainly. Just go out the door, take a left, and go down two blocks. You can’t miss it.” The visitor expresses his thanks and goes out – problem solved.

So I realized, it’s not a requirement that I react the way society expects me to, or the way my own emotions first tell me, to anything said to me. I don't need to be hurt, angry, indignant, annoyed. I also don’t need to be a language police for people – to tell them that the way they’re communicating is wrong and try to get them to do it differently. Instead, I can just consult the corrected manuscript and respond to what they’re really saying. And I remember that they’re either saying “love me,” “I love you,” or both.

The interesting thing about this exercise is that when I respond as if that is what they actually said, nobody finds it to be a non sequitur. They act as if I have actually responded appropriately to what they said.

If anyone else wants to try this experiment, I’d be very eager to hear the results.