My wife and I lived in Ankara from 1998-1999. She taught at an English-language university, while I taught at the affiliated preparatory school. The lower grades at the prep school had a fully bilingual program, and there was a covey of Turkish elementary school teachers.
During our first month of school there was a cocktail party to introduce
the new employees. My Turkish was very poor (and still is, I'm afraid),
but my wife was testing how well her affinity for languages was carrying
over to the Turkish language. So during the cocktail party, she was telling the
elementary school teachers, 3 of 4 of whom only spoke Turkish, how she was
practicing and learning vocabulary with people at the university.
At one point, she
proudly told a crowd of Turkish elementary-school teachers that she had
learned left-handed vs. right-handed. My wife told the teachers that she was
left-handed (solak in Turkish), and then referred to me as a sağlak -- intending to mean that I was right-handed.
We didn't know just what was wrong, but we knew there was something when
all the teachers turned red and started tittering and suppressing their
laughter. Everyone was too polite to explain the mixup, but we rushed to
the dictionary when we got home that night...
We found that there isn't really a single word for "right handed" in Turkish -- it takes several Turkish words (e.g., sağ elini kullanan) to convey that meaning. My dear wife had been stretching logic (and her limited Turkish-language knowledge) a bit too far -- when she had concocted 'sağlak' on the fly.
But what we did find in the dictionary was the Turkish word 'salak' (pronounced almost
identically as 'sağlak') -- which means fool, clown, idiot, dolt, etc.
After some reflection, my wife seemed to think it wasn't such an bad
description for me after all, and she continued to remind me of her
"mistake", with giggles -- for weeks...
MB August '00
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