idiot in arabic language — 1 thorough investigation

idiot in arabic language, with the third yoga mat watching from the corner of the kitchen, was the search i settled on after the group chat went quiet and a direct message i sent at midnight refused to age into anything dignified. meetings, separately, could be emails.

writing this from the desk. carla is upstairs in a vendor onboarding thing on three. i have, give or take, the rest of the morning before someone asks me to “circle back”.

so the longer answer to idiot in arabic language, before i forget i was looking, is: i was attempting to follow an arabic-language yoga tutorial on my phone, propped against the kitchen kettle, with no subtitles and the volume up, while standing on the third yoga mat, which had been pulled out from under the couch for the second time in a calendar year. i did this because the pillar post on idiot already covered the english version and i wanted, briefly, a different word for the same problem.

the tutorial was on minute three of what was, allegedly, a fifteen-minute beginner flow. i did not understand a single instruction. i copied what the man on the screen was doing, in the order he was doing it, with the confidence of someone who has decided language is, in this specific case, decoration.

this post is mostly about the yoga mat. the arabic got me here.

desknote: this is the kind of investigation that begins as a search and ends as a kitchen incident. the order, in this house, is reliable.

idiot in arabic language, what i found

so what i found, propped against the kettle, was that idiot in arabic language comes back as ahbal. i will not attempt the script. i will say the word out loud, badly, and report that it sounds, to my ear, like a small exhale. ah-bal. there is no slap in it. it is the noise a kind man makes when he sees you do something predictable and decides not to make it worse.

the english word, by comparison, has the consonants of a door slammed by a person who meant it. id. i. ot. three small punches. ahbal does not punch. ahbal arrives, looks at you on the third yoga mat, and waits for you to figure out what you’ve done.

i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere about the way the sound of a word colours how it lands. i did not find it. i found a tutorial in arabic, a translator app that took the question seriously, and a yoga mat that has, by now, witnessed three of my worst mornings.

the third yoga mat, somehow involved

the third yoga mat was bought in 2023 with the firm intention of being used. the firm intention has, in the intervening years, softened. the mat lives under the couch. it comes out approximately once per calendar season, when i decide, briefly, to be a person who does yoga.

this morning the mat came out for what i now realise was its second appearance of the year. the first appearance ended with me lying on my back, staring at the ceiling, deciding the ceiling needed a paint job. the second appearance — the one in question — ended with me trying to follow an arabic-language tutorial in which the instructor was, possibly, very calm, and i was, definitely, not.

the seventh microwave watched from the counter. it has watched everything in this kitchen since february. it makes no sound now. it has earned the silence. dave keeps the list of microwaves on a napkin in his glove compartment, but the seventh has, so far, refused to give him reason to update it.

i did three poses. one was, i think, a downward shape. one was a sideways shape. one was a shape the instructor did not do, which i invented because my hamstrings disagreed with the previous one. the kettle whistled. i stopped. that was the workout.

the dm i sent in a different language, regrettable

the search for idiot in arabic language was, in fairness, the second incident of the cycle. the first was a direct message i sent at 12:08am to a person who, in the morning light, did not need to receive it. the message was three lines long. it included the word idiot as a self-description. by 7:14am i had decided that perhaps a different word, in a different alphabet, would soften the receipt.

this is, as a strategy, not a strategy. you cannot retroactively translate a message you have already sent. the recipient has the english version. the english version is loud. the english version arrived at midnight with no script change available. i am aware of how that sounds.

but the search, in the morning, was a small attempt at private repair. if i could call myself ahbal in my own kitchen, on my own mat, in a language that does not punch, i could perhaps reduce the temperature of the regret by a degree or two before the workday started. it did, in fact, work. for about eleven minutes.

the muted group chat that started it

the group chat was muted at 10:42pm the previous night. five people i used to text with frequency. now muted. the dm at midnight was, in the strict chronology, an attempt to escape the silence i had personally enforced. you mute a chat, the chat goes quiet, you go looking for someone to talk to. (this is a documented mistake. i have made it before. i will, statistically, make it again.)

the chat used to be useful. people sent links. people argued about the merits of the cousin word at the odia version of the same problem, which is murkho — a soft word i found on a different night with a different yoga mat appearance — and people sent screenshots of weather. now it is muted. now i send dms at midnight to one person, in english, with no buffer, and try, in the morning, to translate myself into a kinder language.

this is the loop. mute the chat. send the dm. regret the dm. search the kinder word. find ahbal. go to work. the loop has, so far, taken approximately ten months to traverse, and i have traversed it, by my admittedly biased count, three times.

every meeting could be a 3-line email, briefly

let me lay this out, because it is related, and you can write it down. every meeting could be a 3-line email. i’ll wait while you nod.

AHBAL. SOFTER. NO SLAP. JUST A SHRUG.

this take, by the way, has been validated, in its own way, by every quarterly review carla has attended without me. the company has, for four years, declined to ask me to attend any meeting on the third floor. i am, by every available measure, fine. the third floor is, by every available measure, also fine. the meetings are the variable. the meetings could be emails. ahbal is, separately, a softer word for the people who think otherwise.

the case for cross-language self-roast

here is the affirmative argument. when you have called yourself an idiot in english enough times for the word to lose its shape, you are allowed, i’d argue obligated, to look the same word up in another language and try it on. it’s reclamation. it’s also, frankly, a cheap form of self-care that does not require a subscription.

think of the cousin practice — closer to the terminal, the spielberg film about a man stuck in a language he doesn’t speak — except instead of an airport, it is your kitchen, and instead of a passport problem, it is a yoga mat from 2023 and a regrettable dm. the principle is the same. you are stranded. you find the local word. you wear it badly. you survive.

cross-language self-roast is, in this sense, the most peaceful kind of self-roast. you are not insulting yourself in your own tongue. you are borrowing a softer word from a language whose speakers, on this matter, were generous enough to have one. ahbal is the loan. i return it daily. it remains kinder than the english.

and on the topic of borrowing kinder words from elsewhere — i once read a long argument that gaslighting, the term and the practice, gets used against people for behaviour that is, on inspection, just regular memory disagreement. i’m not weighing in on the gaslighting debate as a whole. i’m noting only that english, as a language, has a habit of choosing the word with the most teeth and then forgetting it had teeth. arabic, on this one specific noun, did the opposite.

verdict, the word travels, also exhausts me

so where this lands. idiot in arabic language is ahbal. ahbal is softer. softer is, in this kitchen, a service. the third yoga mat was, briefly, useful as a stage on which to discover the word. the seventh microwave was, throughout, a witness. the dm i sent at midnight is unrecallable. the muted group chat will, statistically, be unmuted at some point in the next forty days, by accident, while looking for a different conversation.

i will not be following any further yoga tutorials in languages i don’t speak. it was clarifying for one morning. one morning is enough. the next time the third yoga mat comes out, it will be paired with silence, the kettle, and possibly a podcast in a language i partially understand, which is, on inspection, mostly english plus some swearing.

language did not save me. it gave me a quieter syllable to mutter while doing exactly what i was already doing. i will take it. ahbal. not a slap. a small exhale.

carla rounded the corner. i minimised the tab. she walked past with the laptop open and a frown that could be the vendor or could be the coffee. i’ll know by the third email she sends without me on copy.

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