The best way to deal with a foreigner, any old-school Brit will tell you, is to shout at the blighter in English until he catches on. If he professes not to understand, just turn up the volume till he does. A man who doesn't speak English is a man who isn't worth speaking to. Robert Byron, the great traveler of the '30s who wrote so feelingly on Islamic culture, got great comic effect by treating every alien he met -- even an American -- as an unintelligible buffoon; and his John Bullish contemporary Evelyn Waugh all but enunciated a Blimp's Code by asserting that no man who knew more than one language could express himself memorably in any. (Take that, Nabokov! Et tu, Samuel Beckett!)
To speak or not to speak: it is a question at least as old as moody Danes delivering English couplets. And every year, as summer approaches, we face the same dilemma: whether to try, when in Rome, to speak as the Romans do or to rely on Italian cabbies speaking English (with brio, no doubt, and sprezzatura). In some respects, it comes down to a question of whether 'tis better to give or to receive linguistic torture. The treachery of the phrase book, as every neophyte soon discovers, is that you cannot begin to follow the answer to the question you've pronounced so beautifully -- and, worse still, your auditor now assumes you're fluent in Swahili. Yet sticking to English, it's easy to feel that you've never left home at all (and are guilty, to boot, of a Waugh-like linguistic imperialism).
In recent years, of course, the spreading of the global village has made cross-purposing a little easier. We think it only natural to ask for hors d'oeuvres from a maitre d' -- as natural, perhaps, as discussing Realpolitik and the Zeitgeist with a Hamburger. And as English has become a kind of lingua franca, all of us are fluent in Franglais and in Japlish. It really is possible for an un-self-made man, arriving in Paris, to ask a mademoiselle for a rendezvous and then take her for le fast food and le dancing and even, perhaps, le parking. But later she may call him un jerk, and he may get upset if he doesn't know that the term, in French, means an expert dancer.
The problems are most acute, in fact, when both parties think they're speaking the same language: Shaw's famous crack about England and America being "two countries separated by the same language" is 30 times as true now that up to 60 countries claim English as their mother -- or at least stepmother -- tongue. An Australian will invite you to a hotel, and you may be shocked if you don't know that it's what you think of as a bar. An Indian will "prepone" a meeting, and only if you're quick enough to calculate "postpone" in reverse have you any chance of showing up on time. Above all, as English has become a kind of prized commodity -- and a status symbol -- in many corners of the world, those of us born in possession of it are apt to feel as vulnerable as a bejeweled dowager in a dark back alleyway. There's always someone waiting to jump out and mug us with his English -- before we can try out our Bahasa Indonesia on him.