One of the first things I noticed when I moved to the Middle East was the incessant usage of the word yanni. Now most Arabs, especially in the business community, speak fluent and sophisticated English, so communication is rarely a struggle. But something weird that I couldn't quite ignore about their language is the over peppering of the word Yanni. "You see, yanni, at the end of the day..."
"Yanni, give it a week's time..."
"Our shortage of water, yanni, makes it hard for our agricultural sector to really blossom"or most commonly...
"Tomorrow, yanni!"
I was hearing yanni so much that I was starting to think it was code for something, but I was reluctant to ask, for fear of sounding ignorant. Clearly, yanni is so obvious because everybody was using it. How could I be missing this? Could yanni be in reference to a person?
The only Yanni I knew is the goofy Greek composer (ala mustache and flowy-mullet) who melts the hearts of blue-haired women in Midwestern bridge clubs. Or who's inspirational melodies blared from the walkmans of sensitive beefy guys at the gym in the mid-90s.Clearly, it wasn't this guy.
Days went by where I was quietly bombarded by this awkward word until I eventually figured out that yanni literally means means in Arabic, but its more common meaning is um, errrr, or I mean, or like--- just a filler word, void of anything grandiose or substantive.
Now that I get it, it's annoying as heck. I've come to detest Yanni. It's the tripe of the Arabic langauge. The mashed heads and hooves that glue together the train of thought in the Arabic mind, so sticky that it can't escape the tongue, even when speaking English. It's is the thick molasses that never quite gets sifted out, so its taste lingers, bitter and tacky as it is.
