Lost in Translation

“Lost in Translation: Or, How ADT and the English Language Became Co-Conspirators in My Public Humiliation” by Hans Casteels, reluctant polyglot and hormonal hostage

I used to speak four languages. Five, if you count sarcasm, which I do. A lifetime of switching between Flemish precision, German structure, French flair, and finally, English, the linguistic equivalent of a thrift store where everything is technically usable but most of it smells faintly of irony and wet carpet.

Then came ADT.

And now I can’t remember the word for… um… you know… the thing. With the… what do you call it… ends. God, it holds stuff. It’s… rectangular? Possibly blue? Never mind. Not important. Probably.

It’s not that I’ve forgotten English. No, that would be too merciful. What’s happened is worse. The words are still in there somewhere, jostling for position behind a hormonal fog thicker than a Belgian winter. They just emerge… wrong. And usually at the worst possible moment.

Take last week. I was trying to tell my grandson to “tidy up the garage.” What came out was, “Please organize the… the man-hole… no, the metal… ugh, the rectangular smell-chamber.” He blinked. I blinked. We both agreed to never speak of it again.

My wife, ever the psychiatrist, insists it’s mild cognitive disruption due to chemical castration. I prefer to call it “an immersive avant-garde language experiment, performed live in front of increasingly horrified witnesses.”

I’ve taken to writing things down. Lists. Notes. Mnemonics. Post-its breeding on the fridge like hormonal rabbits. Yesterday I found one that read, simply: “Remember the fish aren’t in the oven anymore.” I don’t know what it means. I’m terrified to find out.

There are days I long for German’s rigid sentence structure. At least there, if you forget your verb, you’re just silent until the end. And French, well, it’s 60% style anyway. Forget a word and you can just pout and wave vaguely toward your baguette. People applaud. But English, English is unforgiving. It expects precision from a brain that’s being chemically sedated into docility and told, “You’ll thank us when the PSA drops.”

I’ve tried explaining this to friends: that ADT is like being dropped into a subtitled movie where the subtitles are occasionally upside-down and written in Ukrainian, and you’re expected to follow the plot while also remembering whether or not you’ve put on pants.

But the best part, the very best part, is that this linguistic degeneration happens in public.

I recently asked a pharmacist if she had “those stretchy things for ankles,” when the word I wanted was compression socks. Instead, I said, “Do you sell long medical sausages for feet?” She stared at me like I was trying to re-enact Kafka’s lesser-known pharmaceutical period.

Another time, I tried to ask a neighbour how her mother was doing after surgery. What I said was, “How’s your old woman holding up after the… the slicing… event?” She paused, and very slowly closed her gate.

At a dinner party, a rare, doomed foray into society, I meant to compliment the host on her “lovely ambiance.” What came out was, “You’ve got great ambient… smells.” That sentence ended with me chewing silently on a breadstick, praying for death.

And, in a moment that surely sealed my legacy as a bilingual health hazard, I once tried to explain that my hormone injections were “managing my cancer.” What I blurted instead was, “They make my testicles vanish but in a controlled fashion.”

I no longer get invited places.

So now, I nod a lot. I gesture. I say “thingy” and “what’s-it” and “that-doohickey” like some elderly Cockney chimney sweep. And when people look at me strangely, I just say,
“Sorry. English is my fifth language. And my testosterone has gone into witness protection.”

They laugh. I pretend it was intentional. And then I go upstairs to stare blankly into the fridge, trying to remember what I came for. Possibly fish. Possibly not. One never really knows anymore.

But whatever it was, it probably had a name once. In some language. Long ago. Before ADT.