Lessons from a Dan: Listening

This is something I meant to post about after our trip to the Genoa Science Festival last year. Alas. At any rate, this year was the third time Mr. Improbable has been to the festival, and both this year and last, our sword-swallower friend Dan Meyer has come with us to be part of the show.*

Dan, who used to be happy just speaking Danish and feeding his wallaby, is fairly good with languages. Last year, when he came down to join us, he’d taken a nine-hour train ride from one of the northern countries. And he experienced the situation we all dread being caught in: nine hours next to a loud, dysfunctional, argumentative family.

So many times we can’t change the situation that we are in, but can only control our response to it. Dan decided that since the family was Italian, and he was bound for Italy anyway, he’d take the opportunity to eavesdrop himself into linguistic competence. Whenever he could identify a discrete word, he’d look it up, make a note of it, and practice it. By the time he arrived in Genoa, he had enough of a working vocabulary to be able to acquire more. I’m sure Dan might have preferred peace and quiet on his train ride, but if the opportunity to learn some Italian was on offer, he wasn’t going to turn it down.

*Dan won the 2007 Ig Nobel Medicine Prize along with Dr. Brian Witcombe for their report, “Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects.”

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