Nothing is Wrong. Nothing Works.

There’s a moment when you live abroad where nothing goes wrong—
and nothing quite works.

No one is rude.
No one tells you no.
Nothing actually breaks.

And yet, nothing quite works.

You’re not rejected.

You’re just… not who it was built for.

And it takes a while to realize that’s what’s happening.

TL;DR:
Sometimes the problem isn’t that a place pushes you out.
It’s that it was never designed with you in mind.

You feel it in language. In systems. In small, quiet moments—
long before you can explain it.

The Bar

In 1980, Devo played a small bar in Paris for French television.

On paper, it made sense.
A band. A stage. An audience. Cameras.

But something was off.

The audience sat there, watching.

Not hostile.
Not engaged either.

Just… trying to understand what they were looking at.

At one point, Mark Mothersbaugh sang into an ice cream cone.

No one reacted.

And watching it over 40 years later, I found the whole thing incredibly entertaining.

Not Rejected

It’s easy to call that rejection.

But it isn’t.

It’s a mismatch.

No one booed.
No one walked out.
No one pushed back.

The audience simply wasn’t there for that.

They expected something familiar—chanson, variety, something legible.

Instead, they got something built on a completely different set of rules.

Different references.
Different humor.
Different logic.

TThe problem wasn’t disliking it.

They just weren’t the audience.

A Familiar Feeling

Living abroad feels like that more often than you expect.

Not rejected.

Not unwelcome.

Just slightly out of step.

You say something that should connect—and it doesn’t.
You follow a process that should work, and it…stalls.
You wait for responses that never come.

Nothing dramatic.

Just a quiet sense that the situation isn’t quite created for you.

Language

You feel it in language.

In Spain, you can get things wrong and still move forward. People adjust. They meet you halfway.

In France, there’s a moment where the conversation simply stops.

Not rudely.

Precisely.

You’ve drifted too far from what the language expects.
And it doesn’t stretch to catch you.

There’s a term for this: out-group language.

Not just vocabulary—the timing, the tone, what’s implied, what never gets explained.

Every place has it.
And within every place, there are different ways of hearing it.

And then there are shibboleths—small signals that tell people, instantly, whether you belong.

@lingonardishibboleths #language #linguistics #history

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I get asked sometimes, “Are you English?”

What they mean is: you speak English, but not like us.

It happened the other day. A man had lost his dog and was asking around.

I understood him. I tried to respond.

But somewhere in the exchange, it shifted.

Not wrong.
Just… off.

I hadn’t learned how to explain in that moment—not in French. Maybe not at all.

I call these the “Y’all ain’t from ‘round here, are ya?” kind of moments.

You don’t always hear the difference.

But they do.

There’s an entire body of work on how adults learn French as outsiders—how much of it isn’t just vocabulary, but timing, inference, what goes unsaid.

People have been studying this for decades.

And still, when you’re in the middle of it, it just feels…off.

Paperwork

Then it shows up in small, practical ways.

The classification that doesn’t quite fit your situation.
The office that doesn’t answer, or they answer at 4:58pm on the last day before a long weekend, then only respond months later again.
The process that assumes you already know how it works.

No one explains it.

Because for the people it was designed for, no explanation is necessary.

[And French folks have to be frustrated by this as well, but maybe it’s more familiar…?]

You’re not being excluded.

You’re just not who they had in mind.

The Default User

Every place has one.

The baseline.

The default user.

They know where to go.
They know how long things take.
They know what doesn’t need to be said.

If you are that person, everything feels natural.

You never see them.
But everything is built around them.

If you’re not that, everything takes longer.
Learning curves are steeper.

You have to learn the organization, then the process, then the language that explains the process. The metaphors. They’re different. And when a series of different metaphors stacks up, it gets confusing as hell.

And even then, you might be left guessing.

I’ve had this happen in a hardware store.

I thought I knew what I needed. Wood finish is wood finish.

But the categories were different. The logic was different.
The way the problem was understood was different.

And standing there, you realize—

this wasn’t built for someone who needed to ask.

Back in the Room

That’s what makes that Devo performance interesting. Or a reminder, at least.

Not just strange. Not just funny.

Clear.

The band didn’t change.
The audience didn’t change.

Both stayed exactly as they were.

And that quiet gap between them stayed exactly as it was.

Pattern Recognition

After a while, you start to see the pattern.

Like with language—if you can’t hear a sound, you can’t quite produce it either. I’ve seen that with my students.

The delay.
The friction.
The sense that you’re a step out of sync with everything around you.

And once you recognize the pattern, something shifts.

You stop assuming everything is supposed to work for you.
You stop reading every difficulty as a failure.

Sometimes, you’re just not the intended audience.

Ending

There’s something relieving about that.

Nothing is wrong.
No one is pushing you out.

And still—
it doesn’t quite work.

Not everything needs to be fixed.
Not everything needs to adapt.

Some things were never built with you in mind.

And your job isn’t always to change that.

Sometimes it’s just to recognize where you are—
and where you aren’t.

Where have you felt this?

Not rejected—just slightly out of place.

Language, systems, culture—where did things stop working the way you expected?