liar in arabic — 5 borrowed words and 1 elevator

an audio in arabic arrives on whatsapp. liar in arabic, i am told later by translation, is kadhab. i don’t open the audio. the elevator door opens for the landlord and i pretend i am going up. a certified letter sits in the lobby drawer the way a sentence sits in a language you refuse to learn.

so the morning has me, the lobby, the drawer, and a phone vibrating against the keys. that is four things, three of them avoidable, one of them already too late.

writing this from the desk now, thursday, 11:23am, while the floor’s vendor walkthrough chews up the conference room with the bad blinds. carla is up there with a notepad. she’ll be down by 12:30, slightly meaner than she went in.

liar in arabic is most often translated as kadhab (كذّاب), the intensive form of one who lies habitually, or in lighter daily speech, kazib. arabic carries other weights too: munafiq (hypocrite, religious tone), mukhadi' (deceiver), kazzab (a softer dialect variant). a borrowed word feels lighter to the speaker. that lightness is the appeal.

A WORD. IN A LANGUAGE. YOU DON’T SPEAK. STILL FINDS YOU.

liar in arabic, the table i made on the back of a printout

i drew this on the back of a forecast printout, with a pen that committed to the page about halfway through the second row. the words are not mine. the rough glosses are mine, and probably wrong in the small ways that matter to a real arabic speaker but not to the post.

the longer corridor on the english noun this whole cluster keeps reaching toward sits in my walkthrough on the noun liar as a working pattern rather than an insult. the table here is the cousin of that table, in a borrowed alphabet i cannot pronounce without my mouth admitting it.

the whatsapp audio i did not open

so the audio. it arrived at 9:47 with a number i don’t recognize and a duration of two minutes and eleven seconds. i did not play it. i moved the phone face-down on the desk and watched the timestamp settle. ignoring is a sentence in the present tense.

later, i ran the transcript through a translator, which is not the same as listening. the translator handed me back a paragraph with the word kadhab twice. somebody, on a voice-note, was calling somebody else a habitual liar in a language i do not speak. the call was not for me, i decided, because deciding is what i do instead of confirming.

a phone call you don’t return grows. the not-returning compounds, the way an interest rate compounds on a debt nobody is checking. by lunch the audio is louder than when it arrived, and i still have not played it.

the cluster’s earlier kitchen pass on the cousin word — closer to kadhab in english — is in my taxonomy of the habitual liar as a routine reflex rather than a plan.

the elevator where i had my best thinking about this

the elevator is where i actually thought about the word. between floor two and floor four, with the landlord on board, holding what looked like a renewal notice and a thermos. i pressed five even though i needed three. the landlord stepped off on three. i stayed in, went to five, came back to three on a separate trip twelve minutes later, for what was, in plain language, a phone call i did not want to take in person either.

most of my best thinking happens in transitional rooms. the elevator. the queue at the post office i avoid. these are the rooms where i make small, calm decisions about which truths to delay.

the language of the audio mattered, in the elevator, because of the buffer. kadhab, said by someone i did not know, about someone i did not know, in a language i did not parse on first hearing — felt like weather happening on a different continent.

cognates and the small misunderstanding industry

arabic and english do not share roots, in the language-tree sense, but the misunderstanding industry between them is busy. kadhab rhymes, accidentally, with english words it has nothing to do with. that’s the trap. cognates that aren’t cognates.

my one arabic-speaking colleague, in 2019, called me habibi across the open-plan, and i nodded for two months before learning it meant something closer to my dear than buddy. nobody was hurt. one of us was a mild idiot. only one.

the kitchen pass for the english side of this corridor is in my walkthrough on what the english word liar carries that other languages don’t. the borrowing trade is, on average, asymmetrical. you can carry kadhab into english as a soft term. you cannot, by my unscientific reading, carry the english liar into arabic without it landing harder. the freight is uneven.

why a foreign curse word feels less personal

a curse word in a language you didn’t grow up in is a costume. kadhab, said in my office voice on a thursday at the desk, is a costume word. nobody at the desk has the receipts on it. the only person within earshot is the printer, which is, by the way, out of toner since monday.

the borrowed word is a polite cousin. it doesn’t carry the kitchen, the doorway, the specific person who used it on you when you were eleven. it is a passport word. it can travel. it cannot do the heavy domestic work the native word does. the cinematic shorthand most english speakers reach for is the 1997 jim carrey film about a man legally unable to lie for a day — a setup that, in any other language, would have to be re-translated to land. the gag does not, by my limited reading, port cleanly into arabic. the costume doesn’t fit the cousin’s wedding.

when the audio in arabic arrived, its central word was, by the translator’s count, the heaviest in the message. for the speaker, it weighed everything. for me, at a desk with a printer out of toner, it weighed a postcard. that asymmetry is the whole reason i did not open the audio.

the urdu-side cousin to all this is in my notes on the urdu word for liar and how it travels into english conversation. the borrowed-word logic carries across both, with different freight costs.

vendor walkthrough has reportedly broken for ten minutes. carla, by the building texts, is in the lobby with a coffee. that puts the timer at, generously, twenty more minutes before the partition gets noisy and the post gets minimised when she rounds the corner.

verdict, in arabic the word still finds me

for the cluster’s lighter english walkthrough — the one i used as the corridor when i was sketching this table on the printout — see the kitchen pass on habitual lying as a small-traffic reflex i have receipts on. that’s the closer hallway. this post is the elevator in it.

↑