Lingua Texta

I’m working on a story that involves making a lot of calls and sending a number of e-mails to Gaza.

Here are some of the interesting aspects of trying to be in contact with that mangled place:

1. Phones ring and ring and between foreign-sounding beeps, whooshing, windy sounds blow. It sounds far away, desert-bound, tired.

2. Phones are tapped.

3. Whooshing, windy sounds are probably not related to phones being tapped. But it makes one wonder.

4. Not dialing “011” in order to ring out of the U.S. and following that with a phone number in Gaza leads you to a nice woman in Plano, Texas, who has had the same number for 12 years. “Oh,” she said when I told her I forgot to dial “011,” “I do that all the time.”

5. My correspondents write to me in very good English, considering. But let’s parse this last message I just received:
“OK ,, my dear ,, but i'll send it tomorrow, r u agree ??”

Let’s start with the double commas. That’s it. Just pointing out the double commas.

From there, I believe we can hop, skip and sally past “my dear” and forgive it, as in Arabic he was referring to me as “aazeezati.” Apparently, I was supposed to respond with “aazeezi,” which I have now done, belatedly.

And then we arrive at “r u,” the most puzzling piece of this one-sentence enigma.

Apparently, men who speak Arabic as their primary language have no problem corresponding in the stunted language of English text. I find that fascinating.

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