Cream Cheese Bagels and Mutual Intelligibility

So I’m in this trendy German café, a place called Miner’s Coffee, when I begin to feel it: a remote tumbling, a just-what-is-this? commotion in my abdomen. I had just finished my coffee, which could have been better, and was now faced with a choice: Would I leave the café—which I’d been frequenting for the free wireless internet--or find something there to eat? After a weighing of options, I choose to stay and take care of business with the most obvious German cuisine within eating distance: a cream cheese bagel.

I stand up, stretch, and make my way to the register. Even though I already know what I want (after having sighted it from my oversized, albeit very modern seating arrangement in the corner), I still look at the menu to provide some semblance of decision-making. Three seconds suffice. I reestablish eye-contact and let my demands be known.

„Ich hätte gern einen Cream Cheese Bagel.“

The barista, whose angular hair looks as if it had been dried on the Autobahn, squints.

„Bitte?”

Strange, I think. After making a few hold-on sounds that register in neither language, I find it again on the menu, spot it in the glass display, and repeat my order confidently.

„Ich hätte gern einen Cream Cheese Bagel.“

Silence.

Granted the café was loud, and maybe his aspiring guitar-player deafness and my tendency to mumble formed a combined effort of miscomprehension, but his blank stare was disarming me. Loathe to say it again, I resort to the universal language of pointing.

“Das.” I say.

The barista follows my invisible finger laser to the now unfortunate choice of sustenance.

“Ach!” he aspirates very germanly, turning back to me somewhat tickled, “Einen Creeemchezz Beeyghil!”

Years of learning German and avoiding trendy chains such a Miner’s hadn’t prepared me for this moment. Frozen Strawberry Shake. White Chocolate Mocha. Apple Pie Latte... I realize that he misunderstood me not because of my German, which is not always perfect, but because of my English. It was a bit too accurate, a smidgen too native sounding. I clearly ruined things with my flip of the English switch, sounding like that French snob in my Critical Theory class only in reverse. But I couldn’t help it: the menu, prominently displayed above the counter (for easy pointing), is almost completely in English. What else was I going to do?

“Ja, genau,” I confirm, preparing my most authentic German accent. “Einen Creeemcheezz Beeyghil.”

Einen Creemschezz Beeyghil. We finally understood one another and the minor lesson in communication had been learned. Which would be this: there was nothing proprietary about language. It may have been English, the language I grew up speaking, but it was also, for all intents and purposes, German. In Miner’s coffee (pronounced meener’s coffee) I could have played the language prick and corrected everyone I heard ordering a Schnappehl or a sandvich, but that would have been both irrelevant and, by consensus, wrong.

“Danke.”

I collect my change, wade through the smoke and return to my enormously modern chair. The bagel tastes approximately like the floor, but I finish it in a couple of breaths. Although my brief encounter amounted to pretty much nothing in the increasingly bigger picture of cultural ignorance, for the moment, it made me hear the words --so dear to my Long Island upbringing (see below)-- like, totally ueber-differently.