So the prompt is about food, food and place, foods that remind me of something, and so forth. The thing that I thought of first is probably the best approach on this one, and that was to talk about Rome. Of course it’s about Rome! My favorite topic. And the food in question is antipasto. Antipasto in the United States has come to have a fairly conventional definition—some cold cuts, a few slices of cheese, maybe some olives or a little fresh fruit. Nine out of 10 Italian restaurants will give you some variation on that theme. But those are only a few from among the many things that Italians would serve as antipasti.

Antipasti is the plural of antipasto. And as long as we’re talking about language, here’s what’s wrong the American idea of antipasto: all that the word means is “before the pasta.” And you can serve all kinds of things before the pasta. Sure, cold cuts are an option. Italian cuisine is full of wonderful cured meats—salami, mortadella (what we call “bologna”), prosciutto—and they frequently turn up on antipasto plates. And cheese turns up, too. And not just mozzarella. In Italy, restaurants will serve whatever they have, or whatever was good that day at the market. That’s really the only guideline for putting together antipasto—you serve what you feel like serving, based on what looked good at the market and what you felt like cooking—which is probably guided, at least in some cases, by what the cook felt like eating that day.

I’ve had antipasti that included assortments of freshly pickled vegetables—carrots, eggplant, cucumbers, olives—or roasted vegetables, or breaded and fried vegetables. My all-time favorite in nearly any form in which they care to serve it to me: artichoke hearts. The artichoke is king in Rome. It’s the centerpiece of Roman cuisine from the first harvesting of small, delicate buds in March all the way through the summer and into the late fall, when the last huge heads are served braised or stuffed and roasted. And speaking of blossoms, zucchini blossoms are another thing you’ll find on an antipasto place, usually stuffed with some kind of mild or soft cheese spiced with nutmeg and herbs.

The antipasto experience is typical of the Italian outlook on life. It’s not about blowing you away with the most expensive ingredients or an elaborate technique. It’s about taking things as they come and then finding ways to savor them. I’ve had antipasto plates that are a simple as a pile of olives drizzled with lemon juice and olive oil and served with thick chunks of rustic bread.

Okay, that’s all I’ve got for tonight. Out of gas.

© 2009 Edward F. Gumnick

My reply: “Maybe you need to look for a designer and/or writer who believes that the ‘language of marketing’ is a good thing.”

A week or two later, I received the following letter from Wells Fargo offering to lend me the spectacular sum of $1,076.55 at an enticing interest rate of 19.99 percent.

> Click on the image to see a larger version. <

When I read the first paragraph of the letter, my first thought was, “Behold the language of marketing!” Is this the kind of thing my client wanted? Using ridiculous hyperbole to persuade someone to buy something he doesn’t want or need on terms that are completely at odds with his own best interests?

Editor’s note: A follow-up to this posting—last week, I received another copy of the same letter from Wells Fargo. I was surprised to see that the new copy didn’t say, “This may be the second-most-important piece of mail you will ever receive, next to the one we sent you before.”

When I was in eighth or ninth grade, I taught my parents some rudimentary Spanish. At the time, Dad was working for University of Houston, which was a member of CAMESA, a pan-American research consortium that held most of its meetings in Guadalajara. Mom went with him on several of the trips. My mother had studied French in school and had a pretty good ear for the sound of Spanish; my father had studied German but was a fairly hopeless case. (Sorry, Dad!)

They bought a set of cassette tapes of Spanish lessons. A few evenings a week after dinner, we’d listen to the tapes, and I’d supplement the training by explaining lessons in greater detail, writing out words, drawing diagrams of verb forms, and so forth. It was a source of pride that I had something that I could teach my parents!

When I was in ninth grade, I had just arrived in Spanish class one morning when a student from a lower-level class came into the room to tell our teacher, Mrs. Johnson, that the other teacher hadn’t arrived, and neither had a substitute. I’m not sure what the student expected her to do, but Mrs. J. took decisive action: she sent me and another student from our class across the hall to teach the class. I don’t remember much about the experience, but I can’t imagine that a couple of ninth-graders could have taught Spanish very effectively to a room full of eight-graders.

After I graduated from college, most of my language learning went into cold storage. Living in Tennessee and Texas and working in overwhelmingly English-speaking settings, I rarely got a chance to flex my language muscles. But all of that language study added a lot to my understanding of the roots and nuances of meaning of English words, so I never felt that the time had been wasted.

I always theorized that with my facility for learning languages and my years of study, if I were ever immersed in a Spanish- or French-speaking environment, I could become conversant in a month or two. The only opportunities to experiment came on the occasions when I dated guys who spoke very little English. My Spanish would help to fill in some of the gaps in our conversations when their English wasn’t sufficient. But then I met Mark, a Mexican-American who doesn’t speak a word of Spanish. My skills didn’t improve much during the eight years we were together.

Then last November, I got the chance to test my theory in an unlikely place: Italy. I was five days into a two-week vacation in Rome when I met Augusto, an Ecuadorian who’s lived in Rome for the last seven years. He speaks Spanish and Italian, but barely any English—only a few random words that he’s picked up from American movies.

We chatted online several times before we met in person. I was able to scrape together enough Spanish to get through the standard getting-to-know-you conversations: What is your name? Where are you from? What do you do for a living? How old are you? What do you do for fun? When we decided to meet for dinner, I warned him that my spoken Spanish wasn’t anywhere near as good as my written command of the language. I don’t think he believed me, but I proved it to him by becoming completely inarticulate the moment we met. (In my defense, I can only say that I was overwhelmed by the excitement of the situation: meeting a strange man at an unfamiliar Metro stop and being whisked away into the night on his motor scooter…but that’s a story for another time.)

In Italy, I frequently ask people if they speak English, and they say, “Just a little,” and then I discover that they speak English a hundred times better than I speak Italian. But it quickly became clear that Augusto really doesn’t speak much English. So after my initial nervousness wore off, I accepted the fact that we were going to have to get by with my Spanish. I dug around in my memory for the most useful phrase in any encounter at a language barrier: ¿Cómo se dice en español ____? (How does one say ____ in Spanish?) Another helpful phrase: Más despacio, por favor. (Slower, please.)

Augusto and I hit it off despite the language barrier, and we ended up spending most of the remaining 10 days of my trip together whenever he wasn’t working or playing soccer. Immersion in his Spanish- and Italian-speaking world was the perfect laboratory for refreshing my skills. We were surrounded by objects I could point at to renew and expand my vocabulary: How do you say artichoke in Spanish? How do you say towel? How do you say socks? And I was amazed to find that as the days went by, I grasped more and more of what he was saying from the environmental context—where we were and what we were doing—, from his physical gestures, his facial expressions, his tone, and from the ever-expanding context of our shared experience.

It’s hard to fathom or explain the cognitive mechanism behind that last element. But I found that as I got to know him, I often just knew what he was saying to me in spite of not knowing all of the words he was using. Then I would ask him to explain a specific word or phrase, and he would rephrase it—or sometimes just repeat it more slowly and emphatically—and my seemingly intuitive understanding would give way to another morsel of certainty.

I came back from that vacation with the conviction that it was time to take my love of languages out of mothballs for good. I went to the iTunes store and subscribed to several Spanish language-study podcasts. I particularly like Notes in Spanish, which offers free conversation podcasts that help you learn new vocabulary and grammar from context, supported by handouts that you can download for a modest fee. I bought a Berlitz CD boxed set for learning Italian, which included a bunch of vocabulary exercises to load on the iPod as well as lessons to take on the computer. Mark and I enrolled in a five-week Italian I course at University of Houston Continuing Education.

UH CE is a major client of our graphic-design business, Starfall Graphics, and their accelerated language study program is a mainstay of their business. I asked the director of the AL program to evaluate my Spanish skills. She interviewed me in Spanish for about 10 minutes and then told me that I was ready for Level 5. (What a delightful surprise! I had been thinking that maybe I could manage Level 3.) For the next two weekends, I’ll be taking an intensive Spanish V course.

Oh, and I’ve started reading Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits in the original Spanish. I also asked for help from my friend Joe, a Panamanian who’s lived in the U.S. for many years. He’s agreed to help me practice my Spanish occasionally when we go for walks together at Memorial Park. He’s fluent in English, so I can ask him to clarify in English when the Spanish gets to be over my head.

I don’t know where all of this language study is headed in terms of academic goals or career direction. I’d like to sharpen my skills enough to be able to travel in Spanish-speaking countries (and Italy) with confidence and ease, but I don’t know exactly what I’ll be traveling there to do. I don’t think that uncertainty matters, though. Learning languages is a sufficient end in itself. Understanding a person’s language is a key to understanding that person’s way of looking at the world. For example, I was fascinated by the fact that Joe couldn’t think of a direct translation for the English expression to save time. He thought about it for a few moments, then said, “In Spanish, we just don’t think of time that way—as something you can save.”

I’m excited to imagine the fresh ideas and perspectives that will come from learning more languages and getting to know people who speak them. And at the same time, actively exploring other languages is bound to make me a more skillful speaker (and writer) of English.