Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Lowe's has everything you need

First of all, it's always fun to shop at Lowe's because, since all signs are in both English and Spanish, every visit creates opportunities to enhance your Spanish vocabulary.

While standing for a seeming eternity at the Customer Service desk at my local Lowe's this afternoon, I happened to notice something curious. They have a multi-page chart with, in dozens of languages, the phrase 'point to your language' and 'an interpreter will be provided for you.'

This is a very nice service they are providing, for customers from any nation on Earth. In this list, there were an astonishing variety of world languages, including (I checked) seven dialects of Chinese.

At the end of the 'European' section, after Swedish and Ukranian, I was somewhat astonished to see -- wait for it -- 'Yiddish'. Had to take a photo with my phone:


Think about it - this implies not only that a Yiddish speaker would be shopping at Lowe's for his PVC pipe, electrical fixtures, or whatever (implying a 'handy-around-the-house' Yiddish speaker), but that such a person would speak NO OTHER language, hence requiring the fairly-specialized services of a Yiddish-English translator (who, I assume, normally deals in fiction, rather than laminate).

I didn't check to see if Latin was listed, but, if they thought to include Yiddish, I wouldn't be surprised. If you get back there before I do, let me know.

3 comments:

Thomas "Duffbert" Duff said...

Wait! I know what that says!

"As she slowly unbuttoned her blouse..."

Barry in Portland said...

I am laughing.

Liz Schwartz said...

Hazzah! Maybe the upper echelons at Lowe's listen to the Yiddish Hour...a girl can dream...