My Toughest Opponent

For the next four years I avoided taking up any new languages. I had nothing against any of them (except one). It was just that there were too many gaps in the tongues I'd already entertained and I wanted to plug them up.

The language I had something against was Hungarian. Before a summer weekend with army buddies in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, I went to the post library and checked out an army phrase book in Hungarian to look at over the weekend. The introduction bluntly warned, "Hungarian is perhaps the hardest language in the world, and it is spoken by only about ten million people." I resolved I'd never get any closer to it.

Hungarian was the next language I studied.

When Hungary rebelled against Soviet oppression in 1956, I was invited by the U.S. Air Force to join a team of reporters covering Operation Safe Haven, the airlift of all Hungarian refugees who were to receive asylum in the United States. That was far from enough to make me want to study Hungarian — yet.

Every child is treated to fantasies like Buck Rogers and his invincible ray gun, Superman, Batman, or, in my case, Jack Armstrong and his "mystery eye", a power imparted to him by a friendly Hindu who, merely by concentrating and holding his palms straight out, could stop every oncoming object from a fist to a bullet to a bull to an express train. By this time I began to note that similar powers — offensive and defensive — could unexpectedly and delightfully accompany the mastery of languages.