I drove my Mom to the airport yesterday, hitting all possible and usual hurdles: RAMP CLOSED, TRAFFIC JAM, TOLL BOOTHS. She got on the flight, but my route back also stunk of idled trucks and exhaust fumes. So I popped in CD 1 of my friendly Fodor’s Living Language, “German for Travelers.” Which, ostensibly, I will be in less than 3 weeks when my Mom drops me and my stuffed pepper of a carry-on at the Lufthansa gate. I think I have Danke and Guntentag down pat, but other than that, I wouldn’t be offended if the Germans pressed me about our lack of language education in America.

Truly, it is a problem, or at least problematic. As a person just out of adolescence and the public school system proper, I couldn’t feel more jaded about my inability to grasp diversity in its lingual form. I should mention, too, that I’m a rhetoric student. Certainly, I have innate instinct to ponder the written word. If only I could do so in Foucault’s native French. Would I get more out of “The History of Sexuality?” Would words take alternate meaning, a new economy of reality, an authority that I have never experienced nor understood (as Foucault might put it)? I have no idea, and perhaps I never will. But I know a few people I can ask: My best friend from college studied in Southern France for a year and currently translates for public school systems in Wisconsin, and my lovely boyfriend majored in German and knows a fair amount of Spanish and Arabic. They are both people that fell deeply in love with the laws of grammar and the infinite possibility of communication; as have I. But they have the opportunity to express themselves in not only a different way, but to different people in this world. They had to take their rhetorical desires to the next level on their own, via a system of higher education.

They say that certain people have a knack for lingual learning, and I’d say if that is true then I’m not one of them. Except I haven’t really given it a go until now, while sitting in my Mom’s stalled mini-van on the tollway. If only someone would’ve shoved it down my throat when I was young. What might Foucault think of that? In French, of course…