“Honey, what does that word mean?”
My Bornean husband, after three days in Germany, could stand it no longer. He’d eaten curried sausages, drunk beer, watched tractors thunder by, and gazed happily over a near-harvest wheat field. All in all a delightful trip to rural Lower Saxony in June. But one thing had been eluding him, and at a gloriously idyllic garden barbecue, his patience finally snapped. Why, he asked, was everyone constantly saying “genau”?
“You do it, too,” he grumbled across a table piled with grilled meat. “Sometimes twice in a row! Does itmean ‘yes’?”“Oh.” I had to stop and think. “No, it means ‘exactly’.”“So you’ve been saying ‘exactly exactly’?”“Um. I suppose so.”
He didn’t look convinced. Not least because we were conversing in Malay, in which “exactly” translates…
