One of the great things about being an American, aside from the constitutionally guaranteed freedom to have obscene bumper stickers, is that so many foreign people speak our language (English). You can walk the streets of just about any major city in the world, and as soon as the natives realize that you’re an American, they’ll make you feel right at home.

“Stick them up!” they’ll say. “Please to be handing over your American Express traveler’s checks! Don’t leave home without them!”

Yes, they are clever, those natives. Nevertheless, you may sometimes find yourself in a foreign situation wherein members of the local population, because of a poor educational system or sheer laziness, have not learned to speak your language fluently. This can lead to serious problems, as when for example you’re in Spain, attempting to obtain a chicken-salad sandwich, and you wind up with a dish whose name, when you look it up in your Spanish/English dictionary, turns out to mean “Eel with the Big Abscess.” This is why I strongly recommend that before you travel abroad, you learn to speak a foreign language, ideally the same one that is spoken in whatever country you’re going to.

Of course you probably think it’s hard to learn another language, because you spent years studying foreign languages in high school, and all you can remember is being forced to confiscate verbs and memorize those moronic dialogues wherein everybody seemed to be obsessed with furniture:

PIERRE: Voici le bureau de mon oncle. (“Here is the bureau of my uncle.”)

JACQUES: Le bureau de votre oncle est right prochain de la table de ma tante. (“The bureau of your uncle is right next to the table of my aunt.”)

MARIE: Qui donne un merde? (“Who gives a shit?”)

I took an estimated two thousand years of high school French, and when I finally got to France, I discovered that I didn’t know one single phrase that was actually useful in a real-life French situation. I could say, “Show me the fish of your brother Raoul,” but I could not say, “Madame, if you poke me one more time with that umbrella I am going to jam it right up one of your primary nasal passages,” which would have been extremely useful.

So what you need, as a traveler, is to learn practical foreign expressions. Let’s say you’re in a very swanky Paris restaurant that has earned the coveted “Five-Booger” ranking from the prestigious Michelin Guide to How Snotty a Restaurant Is. You cannot be asking these people to show you the fish of their brother Raoul. You will want to use simple, foolproof phrases such as the following.

Garr,on! Je suis capable de manger un cheval! (“Waiter! I could eat a horse!”) Apportez-moi quelques aliments franqaise ici pronto sur la double! (“Bring me some French food immediately!”) Mettez-le smaque dabbe sur la table. (“Put it smack dab on the table.”) Attendez une minute au jus dernier! (“Wait just a darned minute!”) Qu’est-ce 1’enfer que c’est? (“What is this the hell that this is?”) Attemptez-vous A yanquer ma chaine, boudet? (“Are you trying to yank my chain, buddy?”) Je donne madam CHAT plus viande que cette! (“I give my damn CAT more meat than this!”) Sacre moo! Ce EST mon chat! (“Holy cow! This IS my cat!”)

Nous sommes suppose a faire peepee ICI? (“We’re supposed to pee HERE?”)

Mais nous sommes droit dans le friggant RUE. (“But we’re right in the goshdarn STREET.”)

y a des RELIGIEUSES regardant nous. (“There are NUNS watching us.”)

Dites, cette religieuse est hot. (“Say, that nun is fairly attractive.”)

Peut-etre j’ai been en France trop longue. (“Perhaps I have been in France too long.”)

In the Restaurant:

Camarero, hay una mosca en mi sopa. (“Waiter, there is a fly in my soup.”)

Pero esa mosca es atarado al pantalones. (“But this fly is attached to a pair of pants.”)

Jey, no es anybody pilotando ese autobus? (“Hey, isn’t anybody driving this bus?”)

ESE es el piloto? (“THAT’S the driver?”)

El hombre que dormir en el charco de saliva? (“The man sleeping in the Puddle of saliva?.”)

Quiza deberias empujar los frenos. (“Maybe we should apply the brakes.”)

Que the hell usted decir, una cabra ha comido los frenos? (“What do you mean, a goat ate the brakes?”)

Porque estan mi frente marcas de preguntas al reves? (“Why are my front question marks upside down?”)

Mi (esposo, esposa) es been tramplado por toros. (“My [husband, wife] has been trampled by bulls.”)

No, no estoy quejarsando. (“No, I’m not complaining.”)

Muchacho, es mi booty dolorido desde ese caso de los trots! (“Boy, is my butt sore from this diarrhea!”)

El hace yo pasar como el tarde Campos de Totie! (“It’s making me walk like the late Totie Fields!”)

Non desear chiunque ferire or nothing. (“We don’t want anybody should get hurt.”)

Tuo fratello Raoul dormi con los pesces. (“Your brother Raoul sleeps with the fishes.”)

Achtung! (“Gesundheit!”)

Enschreitenblatten Schalteniedlich Verkehrsge sellschaft! (“Ha ha!”)

Ich veranlassenarbeitenworken mein Mojo. (“I have got my mojo working.”)

You’re probably not going to believe this, but there are still some people, in this modern day and age, who are afraid of air travel. Ha ha! Are they a bunch of Nervous Nellies, or what?

Oh, sure, air travel seems dangerous to the ignorant layperson, inasmuch as it involves hurtling through the air seven miles straight up trapped inside an object the size of a suburban ranch home in total defiance of all known laws of physics. But statistics show that, when you’re in an airplane, you’re actually four times as safe as when you’re driving your car on an interstate highway (Provided that you are driving drunk and blindfolded)!

Nevertheless, many of us, even veteran fliers, tend to be a little edgy about air travel these days, because it seems as if hardly a day goes by that we don’t pick up a newspaper and see headlines like:

ENGINE FALLS OFF PLANE

WING FALLS OFF PLANE

PILOT SUCKED OUT OF PLANE

PLANE POSSESSED BY DEMONS

FAA Orders Exorcism of Entire L-1011 Fleet

But the truth is that, thanks to improvements in technology, air travel today is safer than it has been at any time for the past three weeks. Yes, we’ve come a long way since the Age of Aviation began back in the historic year of 19-something in Kitty Hawk, North or South Carolina, when two young mechanics named Wilbur and Orville Wright, using some canvas and old bicycle parts, constructed the very first airline omelet. There have been many important commercial-aviation innovations since then, including:

Airline magazines featuring articles with titles like “Akron: Meeting Yesterday’s Challenges Tomorrow.” “Turbulence.” This is what pilots announce that you have encountered when your plane strikes an object in midair. You’ll be flying along, and there will be an enormous, shuddering WHUMP, and clearly the plane has rammed into an airborne object at least the size of a water buffalo, and the pilot will say, “Folks, we’re encountering a little turbulence.” Meanwhile they are up there in the cockpit trying desperately to clean waterbuffalo organs off the windshield. Frequent-flier programs, wherein each time you take a commercial flight, you earn a certain number of miles, plus bonus miles if you actually reach your intended destination within your lifetime. After you’ve accumulated enough miles, you can redeem them for another flight, unless you have the intelligence of a turnip, in which case you’ll remain in your recreation room, where it’s safe. The Baggage Carousel, where passengers traditionally gather at the end of a flight to spend several relaxing hours watching the arrival of luggage from some other flight, which comes randomly spurting out of a mysterious troll-infested tunnel that is apparently connected to another airport, possibly in a different dimension. The baby in the seat behind you whose parents are obviously poking it with hat pins because there is no other way that a child could shriek that loudly all the way from New York to Los Angeles. The 475-pound man in the adjacent seat who smells like a municipal landfill and whose forearm (which by itself is the size of Roseanne Barr) spends the entire flight oozing, like the Blob, over the armrest until it occupies virtually your entire seat and starts absorbing your in-flight meal through some of its larger pores. This in itself is not a bad thing, because airline food is not intended for human consumption. It’s intended as a form of in-flight entertainment, wherein the object is to guess what it is, starting with broad categories such as “mineral” and