Like everyone else, I have a junk mail filter in my email.

And like everyone else, I get lots of junk mail for drugs I don’t need, money I probably am not really owed, and creams that promise to make me look younger/thinner/prettier, but won’t.

The unusual thing about my junk mail however, is that it is almost always in French.

I find this strange because I do not live in France. I am not even a little French. The closest I come to speaking French is when I order French fries at McDonald’s. Yet I routinely get upwards of five emails a day in French.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I use a French dry cleaners or when I was younger, I used to French braid my hair. I do like French toast and when I get my nails done I get a French Manicure. Of course I also like Spanish omelets and Spanish rice, so go figure.

Out of curiousity, I translated the French emails online. I wanted to make sure that I had not won some kind of French lottery, or stood to inherit a large sum of money from a distant French relative, or was wanted by the French authorities for wanton French fry consumption. But sadly (or fortunately) I was merely being spammed, or as they say in French… le spammed.

After awhile, I just started to ignore them, because that is what the French would do. But then one day I suddenly started getting emails in German. This was even more peculiar than the French emails because I really have no German connections. Of course I do drive a German car and my family once had a German Shepherd as a pet, so maybe that had something to do with it. Then I remembered learning that Beckerman in German translates to “baker man,” so maybe they thought I was a German baker.

Eventually I grew accustomed to both the French and German emails and stopped paying attention to my junk mail filter.

And then one day a new email caught my eye. It looked like this:
명. 세우기; (신체기관, 특히 성기의) 발기; 건설, 설립; 건설물

Now this one was a complete mystery to me. I had no idea what language it was and couldn’t even sound it out. But it looked very important and I thought I needed to make sure that I did not have a very, very, very distant relative in Korea or Japan who had died and left me large sums of won or yen.

Fortunately, if you put a document into Google translator it will tell you what a language is, as well as what it says.

So I copied the email, put it in the translator, and found it was, in fact, Korean.

And now, I am pleased to say, I know how to say “erection” in four languages.

©2012, Beckerman. All rights reserved.
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