in accord

Six months after moving to Paris, I gave up on French school and decided to take the easy way out. All I ever said was "Could you repeat that?" And for what? I rarely understood things the second time around, and when I did it was usually something banal, the speaker wondering how I felt about toast, or telling me that the store would close in twenty minutes. All that work for something that didn't really matter, and so I began saying, "D'accord," which translates to "I am in agreement," and means, basically, "O.K." The word was a key to a magic door, and every time I said it I felt the thrill of possibility.

From In the Waiting Room: The Advantages of Speaking French by David Sedaris in this week's New Yorker

David Sedaris' piece in this week's New Yorker (which is a hundred times funnier than what you're about to read below – and really, you should probably go read that now instead) immediately made me think of traveling with my grandmother, who was raised in a Norwegian speaking household but had never been to Norway until she hit her mid-70s. In Norway she binged on the language like a kid on candy – engaging in long rambling conversations with every cab driver, waiter, and public official that we met.

I sat in silence for the duration of these interlocutions, wondering what she was saying, able to make out only brief phrases like "meine barne barne" (which meant me, I think -- her "child's child") (and, of course, is only a bare phonetic approximation of the actual spelling, because, as should now be evident, I don’t speak – or spell -- Norwegian).

Keep in mind, Norway seemed to be a quiet country – at least the public places were. Folks didn't chat much, idly or for any other reason, and exercised such social restraint that I really had to wonder how my grandmother or I, both given to loquaciousness when we get a good head of steam on, could be of that stock. So given that, my grandmother's voice was frequently the only one to be heard in the vast silences, filling the air with her Norwegian-American accent which just about everybody (when asked) commented was "good, but just a little gravely" – except, of course, for the folks down south around Stavanger, where her own grandmother was from, who thought her accent was exceptional.

As a survival mechanism I begged my grandmother to "teach me to say something agreeable" in Norwegian, and so she taught me to say (here again, spelled phonetically, not correctly): "Ja: da trög." Which she explained meant: "Yes: That's true." Or more true to the spirit: "That's what I think, too."

From there on out we made a most agreeable couple: My grandmother would take off on a ramble, and I would sit there in silence, nodding agreeably, until she came to what sounded like a conclusion. Generally, at that point she would turn to me and ask something with a slight inflection, to which I would answer: "Ja: da trög."

At which my grandmother would turn back to her audience and keep right on going.