Travel Tip #478: In Germany, Turnips are Sexy, And Other Language Lessons from the Road to Elsewhere

Stranger in a strange land? Your tongue can show you the way home.

I HAVE ALWAYS been good at accents. 

I learned this as a seven-year old, when I flawlessly repeated the ad line “It’s not fried, it’s Shake n’ Baked, and I hepped!” with a deep-south accent. It made the grownups laugh, especially in southern Connecticut, where the primary accent is on making loads of money to pay for life in southern Connecticut. 

It gave me confidence to make all sorts of funny noises, including French. 

One reason I wound up in Paris, in fact, was that I loved the sibilant murmur of the la langue Française. 

Peter Sellers, in the Pink Panther movies, wasn’t so much a clown as a man lost in the monotone wonk-wonk-wonk of spoken English. “Do you have a lee-sawnse for your minky,” is in fact a much more interesting way to say it. For me, in French class in college, it was a license to slip through a linguistic trapdoor into something fabulous. 

Why do I love French? Let me compte the ways.

Because they call bad coffee “jus de chaussettes”—sock juice. 

And because a naturally …