Picture a gregarious Japanese kid greeting you with "Que onda?"

I learned the Egyptian dialect at BYU, and every time I use Egyptian words, people grimace and laugh; and when they repeat the words, you get the sense that they feel like taking a shower afterward.

Most of the farm labor here is Egyptian, and the social dynamic is uncannily familiar—they’re darker-skinned than Jordanians in general, and you see dozens of them waiting for work outside hardware stores. Polite Jordanians will refer to them as “hard-working”, while others allude to a perceived machismo and lasciviousness. There’s even a vaguely analogous national discussion about illegal immigration—though it’s a lot less vitriolic since the racial undercurrent isn’t as strong.

So, although everyone claims to be quite egalitarian, there is something about hearing Egyptian Arabic from a rich white kid that they find hilariously dissonant. I guess it would be like a Japanese kid learning English in South Central LA, and then coming to Salt Lake and calling everybody “ese”. Which, by the way, would probably redefine the fish-out-of-water genre as we know it. I want to see a screenplay on my desk by next week.

In any event, I’m trying to adopt the Badia dialect, which has its own tough-guy connotations in the city; it will be interesting to see how it plays. One of the shop vendors has already deemed it hilarious and given me and my colleagues free strawberry-pineapple slushes, though, so confidence is high.