Himglish and Femalese IN ACTION: on a plane

It was six o’clock in the morning; the airline was discount; I had been up since three and was maybe a little grumpy. I had, however, managed to secure a seat on the aisle,with an empty one between me and the next passenger.

Last on the plane was a group of three men about my age who hadn’t bothered to join the line but evidently decided just to stroll on at the end: their choice, therefore, was limited. The lankiest of the three climbed over me into the centre seat and folded his six feet and four inches in. Hm, I thought, that man is very tall. Should I offer him my seat? I mean, I don’t exactly want to be sandwiched in either and am in possession of a relatively lanky leg, but he has at least eight inches on me.

Then he turned to me and interupted my pondering.

‘Not to be cheeky,’ he said, ‘but would you switch seats with me?’

‘Actually,’ I said, now bereft of any sense of charitableness, ‘I quite like the aisle seat. If one of your friends with an aisle seat would like to switch with me, that would be fine.’

He said nothing, and then it was kind of like a real-life manifestion of the beloved trope when you get on a plane and fate dictates that you sit next to someone and fate intervenes and you fall in love, except exactly the opposite of that.

So I spent the next two hours thinking, what exactly went wrong here, and am I the worst person ever? And then I thought, had he sat down and remarked, ‘Oh, dear, I am very tall and now I am sitting in the centre seat. I should have queued up earlier,’ then I probably would have said, ‘Oh, how awful, here, I will switch with you,’ because I am not actually a cold-hearted person and would have recognised it as the desperate plea that it was. In other words? I would have sympathised if he had spoken to me in Femalese.

Unfortunately, his straightforward Himglish approach struck me as quite rude, and thus my feelings of sympathy ceased.

A lesson, perhaps, of how important it is for men and women to learn to speak each other’s languages. (Or why not to sit next to me on a plane. Or the value of saying ‘please’.)