My hovercraft is full of eels

A man walks into a London tobacconist’s, opens a small book, runs his finger along a line, and says, with great confidence: “My hovercraft is full of eels.” He wants to buy cigarettes. His phrasebook has other ideas.

That is Monty Python, 1970 — but the joke is older than the sketch, older than hovercrafts, older than most of the countries whose borders a traveller would carry it across. For as long as people have packed a bag to cross a language, someone has sold them a little book that promised to do the hard part for them: here are the sentences, learn them, and the foreign world will answer back politely. The books were a marvel. They were also, now and then, a catastrophe — and the catastrophes are so perfect that they have outlived almost everything written on purpose.

The book that could not speak English

The patron saint of the genre is a slim Portuguese–English conversation guide first printed in Paris in 1855 under the sober title O novo guia da conversação em portuguez e inglez. Its title page credited two authors, José da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino. Fonseca was a real and competent writer; the running suspicion among scholars is that Carolino attached the respectable name to lend the thing credibility, because the English inside it is the work of someone who plainly could not speak English at all.

The method, as far as anyone can reconstruct it, was the problem. Carolino seems not to have worked from Portuguese into English directly. He appears to have taken an existing Portuguese–French phrasebook and marched each phrase onward into English with a French–English dictionary, word by hopeful word — a game of telephone played across two borders with no native speaker anywhere in the room. What came out the other end was English-shaped and almost entirely wrong.

Its chapter of “Idiotisms and Proverbs” is the usual exhibit. There sits the immortal entry “to craunch the marmoset” — a baffling instruction to crunch a small monkey, which is in fact a mangling of the French idiom croquer le marmot, roughly “to kick your heels waiting at a door.” The literal sense survived the journey; the meaning fell overboard somewhere near Calais. Page after page runs like this, each phrase a tiny monument to the gap between the words of a language and the language itself.

By rights the book should have sunk without trace. Instead it surfaced in the English-speaking world as a comic classic, reprinted in 1883 under the title it is now known by, English as She Is Spoke. That edition carried an introduction by Mark Twain, who understood exactly what he was holding:

Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect.

He meant it as the highest praise. A thing done this badly, this sincerely, cannot be done on purpose — and that sincerity is the whole charm. Carolino was not joking. He believed he was helping.

My postilion has been struck by lightning

Out of this tradition grew a single sentence that came to stand for the whole absurd genre: “My postilion has been struck by lightning.” (A postilion was the rider who sat on one of the horses drawing a carriage — already a quaint figure by the time the line became famous.)

Its exact home is a mystery, and probably always was. The sentence is quoted as coming from a Hungarian phrasebook, or a Portuguese one, or a guide for travellers in the old Russian Empire, with the details shifting each time it is retold — the surest sign that it is less a real entry than a folk legend about phrasebooks, too good to pin down and too good to let go. Whatever its origin, it stuck, and it named a type: a postilion sentence is now shorthand for the phrasebook line that prepares you, in beautiful grammar, for precisely the emergency you will never face. The actor Dirk Bogarde liked it enough to title his 1977 memoir A Postillion Struck by Lightning.

And that is the quiet joke underneath the loud one. A phrasebook has to guess, in advance, every sentence you might need — so it fills up with the specific and the ornate, the lightning-struck postilion and the lost umbrella, while leaving you helpless the moment the conversation steps an inch off the script. You can ask, flawlessly, after the health of the gardener’s aunt. You cannot say the thing you actually want to say.

The sketch that made it perfect

Which brings us back to the tobacconist’s. In a 1970 episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, a sketch usually called “The Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook” imagined the nightmare from the inside: a phrasebook in which every Hungarian phrase is translated into an English sentence that means something else entirely. The Hungarian tourist, trusting it completely, asks to buy cigarettes and announces instead that his hovercraft is full of eels; he tries to pay and tells the shopkeeper that he will not buy this record, it is scratched. Commentators have long suspected the Pythons were tipping their hats to Carolino; whether or not they had him in mind, they had rediscovered his exact comic engine — the phrasebook that betrays the very person clinging to it.

“My hovercraft is full of eels” has since been translated, lovingly and pointlessly, into dozens of real languages by people who will never need it. It is the postilion sentence of our own era: gloriously useless, instantly memorable, and quoted far more often than anything the phrasebook was supposed to teach.

What the funniest failures teach

It is tempting to say the old phrasebooks failed because they were badly made, and some of them were. But the best-made phrasebook in the world has the same flaw, only hidden: it gives you sentences when what you need is a language. A memorised sentence is frozen. It cannot bend to the moment, because you took it in as one solid block and never learned its joints — which word means hovercraft, which carries the is, which could be swapped out for suitcase or heart or morning.

A language is the opposite of frozen. It is a small set of parts you recombine endlessly — which is why a child who knows a few hundred words can say things no one has ever said to them. You reach that the way you reach anything alive: not by swallowing ready-made lines, but by meeting words one at a time, in real sentences, often enough that you start to feel where each one ends and the next begins. Do that long enough and you stop reciting the language and start speaking it — the difference between the tourist reading off a page and the person who can simply, finally, ask for the cigarettes.

Where vocabla fits

You cannot carry a language in your pocket as a list of sentences; Carolino proved that, hilariously, for all of us. But you can carry the parts — and learn them the way they actually work. That is the idea behind vocabla. Across French, German, Italian, Spanish and Russian, it never hands you a frozen phrase to recite. Each word arrives inside a living sentence, comes back on a spaced schedule until it settles, and gives you room to work out its meaning before you’re told — so you end up owning the word, not renting the sentence it came in.

Learn words that way and you are never stranded by a script, because you were never relying on one. The conversation can wander wherever it likes — to the weather, the record that turned out to be scratched, even, heaven help you, the postilion — and you’ll have the pieces to meet it. Your hovercraft, you will be relieved to hear, can stay entirely free of eels.