Saturday, January 31, 2026

Are you a muggle?

 Feel free to respond to my previous post, but this is concerning.


I have to put this into context


The other day I was having a conversation with an aquaintance who is a POC. He was telling me in confidence that he plans to move back because he's giving up. Some of our conversation was in French. I speak several languages.

A few hours later I was waiting outside for someone who was late. A man in his seventies holding a cup of coffee asked me a question in a foreign language. I looked at him indicating that I didn't understand.

Oh did I get the wrong one? 

What language was it, Iasked.

He wouldn't answer. I'm interested in languages, he said.

So am I, I said.

He asks me something in Turkish then farsi. (Which I don't speak, but recognize). He didn't speak them, but had picked up a couple of sentences and asked me to guess what the language was.

I asked if he could identify xiuxiu. He guessed middle east. Wrong phonetics I said. Shisha? he tried.

Something feels wrong

Usually when I get drawn into these conversations, it's by people who have a genuine interest in linguistics or networking. I've met a climate scientist from Australia, a postgraduate student researching linguistics in computer models, a grandma whose son is a researcher at CERN, all because of our accents. We both come away enriched.

How did you become interested in languages? I asked. Oh, I have 10 children with the same wife, they live all over.

Not credible.

Then he asked how I knew the poc guy, was it a friend, was I related.

Xiexie means thank you in mandarin chinese, I replied.

Then he told me that he can trace his ancestry back 200 years and that he is Arian. He started asking me personal questions. Weird, because I'm tall blonde and blue-eyed. I was extremely uncomfortable and told him that it was none of his business.

This is the second time in the last week that this has happened. I'm assuming it's trending? I don't know how to interpret what he was after.


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Are you a muggle?

 Feel free to respond to my previous post, but this is concerning. I have to put this into context The other day I was having a conversation...