Universal Language Mico-mico

Mico-mico

by

Paul R. Meredith

A few years ago when my wife Sandra and I were traveling to Israel, I looked at her as we sat on the plane. “You know, honey, when we get to Israel we will have a hard time communicating with people because we don’t know their language.”

            “Don’t you think many of them speak English?” she asked.

            “Yes, maybe, but probably only the young people will be able to speak it. The older ones won’t know much English.”

            Sandra looked up at me from her magazine reading, with that look on her face that only she can give, and said to me, “So what do you intend to do about it, Mr. Meredith?”

            The question hung there without an answer for a few minutes. Sandra started reading her magazine again. I seriously pondered the dilemma. Suddenly, I tapped her on the thigh and told her, “I am going to invent a method of speaking to them in such a way they will understand.”

            Without looking up from her article that had captured her attention, she softly said to me, “Well, good luck with speaking Hebrew.”

            “No, of course I can’t speak Hebrew, or even Yiddish, but maybe there is another way.” I caught another of those “special” looks as she offered me that sideways glance of disgust. She said nothing more about my comment.

            A few minutes later I excused myself and went to the plane’s restroom facility. When I returned, I announced to her, “I have it! I have invented a new universal language to communicate with the Israelis who don’t speak English.”

            For the third time in a short period of time, I got that awful look of outright disgust. Sandra put her magazine on her lap. She put her finger to her lips as she said, “Keep quiet. Do you want these people to think you have completely lost it?”

            “I’m serious,” I told her.

            “Okay, what is it you want to say? Let me hear about it, but quietly.” She looked around to see if others were listening.

            “Well, I have been thinking abo…”

            “That’s the dangerous part…you thinking,” she interrupted.

            “No, seriously, I have the answer. I just invented the perfect solution when I was in the plane’s restroom thinking about it.”

            “I’m almost afraid to ask, but what did you come up with?”

            “Think about this, and please keep an open mind,” I said. “When we encounter someone who can’t understand English, we simply respond with my universal language, and the beauty of it is it consists of just one single hyphenated word.”

            “Do I dare ask what the word is?” she inquired. She had that look on her face again as she stared at me with beady eyes that I knew represented total disgust.

            “Okay, let’s say that someone asks a question in a language we don’t understand. I will simply hold my hands out with my palms up, indicating I don’t understand. I will say, ‘Mico-mico’ to them.”

            The look was still there as she said, “And that means?”

            “It can mean anything you want it to mean, and not only that, it can be used anywhere in the world one happens to travel where the language is a barrier to communication,” I responded. “The only thing I really need to do is make sure I use voice inflections when I use it. The tone of voice is very important. Hand gestures will also help in many cases.”
            Sandra’s eyes quickly dropped back to her reading. “Leave me alone,” she whispered. No further comment was forthcoming. I knew she was done talking about it.

We were in Sol’s Supersaver in Tel Aviv shopping for a few groceries to take back to our temporary living quarters we were renting on Hyercom Avenue. Having been to the Allenby Street market already, I was somewhat ill from seeing all the turkey necks, chicken feet, severed goat heads, and all the trays of fish with flies swarming over them, so I wasn’t the least bit hungry. But since I knew we had to eat eventually, all I could stomach was some bread and lettuce at the time. As we entered the checkout lane, the cashier uttered something to me, indicating she wanted money. I held out my hand with a few shekels in it and said, “Mico-mico.” I used voice inflection to pose the comment as a question. She took some of my bills and gave me back some change. I said to her, “Mico-mico, in a thankful tone of voice.” We left the store.

            I looked at Sandra and said, “See, it works really great.”

            She muttered something I didn’t quite hear, but it sounded awfully close to, “You damn fool.” Surely that wasn’t it though. Sandra is not prone to using foul language, at least not often.

            Later at the laundry near our apartment where we dropped some clothes off for washing, the man asked me something in Hebrew. I said, “Mico-mico.”

            The man said something else, to which I responded once again, “Mico-mico.”

            The following day I went to pick up our wash. The man asked me another question I didn’t understand. My response once again was, “Mico-mico.” I simply gave him the ticket he had given me the day before and held out some money in my hand. I once again said, “Mico-mico.” He took some of my money and gave me a bag of clothes. I proudly took the bag of laundry back to the apartment and told Sandra, “Mico-mico worked again. Here’s the proof, our clean laundry.”

            Sandra opened the bag and emptied the wash onto the bed. She looked up and asked me, “What the hell happened to these clothes?”

            “I looked at the wrinkled clothes, which didn’t look all that clean. I responded to her question, “Mico-mico.”

            “Don’t use that Mico-mico crap on me. Why are these clothes not pressed and folded?” I could easily see she was not happy. I fully understood my universal one-word language wasn’t going to work on my wife.

“There must have been a communication breakdown of some kind,” I told her. I helped her fold the clothes and put them away.

            A couple of days later, once I was able to eat regular food again, we went out to a local restaurant for our dinner. The waitress approached us and dropped off menus. A few minutes later she returned and inquired of us what we wanted. The menu was partly in English and partly in Hebrew, but it wasn’t clear enough to me to be confident I could order and know what I would get. But I took a chance. I pointed at a menu item and told the waitress, “Mico-mico.”

            She wrote something down on her order pad. Sandra looked at the waitress and said, “I will have the same.”

            The waitress didn’t understand her, so I intervened. I pointed to my wife and back to me. I told the waitress, “Mico-mico,” using proper voice inflection and tone. She wrote something down and left our table. She seemed irritated at something—not sure what it could have been.

            It was quite some period of time before we saw the food, and when it came, we weren’t sure exactly what it was. We carefully forked through it until we felt a measure of comfort in attempting to put it into our mouths, but when we did, we discovered it was quite good. “See, it works every time,” I told Sandra. Secretly I wondered to myself if it was some kind of a dish made with goat meat.

            When we left the restaurant a bit later, we encountered a beggar on the street. He sat on the walk near a door to an apartment and said something to us as we passed. Of course we didn’t understand what he said, but I returned his greeting with my new language. “Mico-mico,” I offered with a friendly smile on my face. He seemed quite contented, settled back and bothered us no more.

            There were a few occasions when we could have answered in English and been understood, but I was so totally committed to my newly invented one-word universal language that I preferred to use it rather than my native tongue. I am quite sure Sandra was totally embarrassed many times during our eighteen days in Israel, but other than offering me her famous look a few times, she remained quiet, for the most part.

During the years that followed our trip to Israel, we were fortunate enough to be able to visit several other foreign countries, including Mexico, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, France, Germany and England. I used the one word universal language at many places we visited. The people seemed to love and understand it at all these places we went, especially at Gibraltar and even in Germany. The beauty of my new one-word language is that it would work equally well in any country in the world where English is not spoken, and even sometimes where it is spoken. There were a few times I have used it even where English is the national language. I have found it convenient to use at various times when you want to avoid certain situations.

            I am seriously wondering why Mico-mico wouldn’t work in any other world, if in fact there were living beings of a humanistic nature inhabiting those other worlds. It might.

I was at one time planning to write my very own dictionary that would include this universal language, but the only word that would be in it was the one I invented, Mico-mico. Since that one word covers all aspects of my newly invented universal language, including statements, questions, remarks, responses, and all else that a language includes, I decided against the idea. I figured it would be too difficult to get a publisher interested in publishing a dictionary that would consist of a single hyphenated word, a word that served as noun, pronoun, article, verb, subject, preposition, and, well, uh, I am sure you get the idea. The book would be rather thin and hard to price in order to make a profit, so I dropped the idea.