Jump to Navigation  Giochi di Parole  by Judith December 12,
2006  There are, perhaps, not so many people who play with words
in their mother tongue. Not many dance through the savannas of
language, dropping chosen words like spoor through the
paragraphs. Even those few who do can rarely rise to that in a
new language.  If you struggle to express nearly unreachable
thoughts and feelings, sometimes you can cobble together a
phrase that may sound almost poetic to a listener, but it
happens rarely and in near-desperation.  When you speak your own
language, you know instinctively that silence also speaks. When
you speak another tongue, you fear a little that silences say
that you are ignorant. You talk too much, you say too many
words. Even the non-words like eh! and boh! are unsure and sound
a little wrong.  As you learn a new language, you learn how to
say something, that way to say it imprints itself, and even if
you later learn another way to say it, you will likely always
use the first term. Often that is th