It's tough enough trying to keep ahead of all the weird-ass stuff that has been happening in the GOP horse race, what with those long-ago debate gaffes, the Herman Cain debacle and now Michele 'The Girl With the Laggin' Tattoo" Bachmann dropping out and Ron Paul gaining ground. And while Mitt Romney is always good for a perplexed shake of the head, I truly wish that I could purchase Rosetta Stone software to help me learn Santorum.
I've heard a lot of great things about Rosetta Stone's language immersion learning, and I have no doubt that it would allow me to converse more confidently in France or Germany or Japan or wherever I might decide to one day travel. However, right now, I am here in America and I could really use something to help me navigate the foreign land of Santorum.
This is a strange place where many new words and phrases are in play, and where, for example, there is no such thing as a Palestinian. I mean, how many classes would I have to take to translate that back into English? And then, supposedly, when someone brings up welfare, it means something about the government giving black people money. That seems much harder to wrap my mind around than the fact that French has words that are both masculine and feminine. Contraception, apparently, means that people do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. How can I be expected to absorb that in a way that will help me converse in this strange language when I visit the land of Santorum? Not to mention that the right to be homosexual seems to translate to the right to engage in either bigamy, incest or man-on-dog sex. How is a language student supposed to just remember something like that well enough to use it later in casual conversation?
It's not like there are no differences in idioms even within the English language itself. God knows if I was in Britain and was told to go out and buy some more bog roll, I might need a nudge to make sure to come back with some toilet paper. But I'm at a loss here. I only hope that Rosetta Stone, a foreign language program that so many people have found so helpful, will step up and guide me through this complicated new foreign country called Santorum.
James Napoli is an author and humorist. More of his comedy content for the web can be found here.