Bring on the code-talkers

From Alex Chee's blog:

... (a story about) a young woman from a part of Switzerland where they speak a very specific Swiss-German dialect and how she stopped using it in public when one afternoon she found herself in line and a man behind her was talking to a woman in this exact dialect, confident they couldn't be overheard. They were talking about some woman's hair and how terrible it looked. She realized they were speaking about her, they thinking as she often did that of course in the US no one would speak this dialect. She doesn't use that dialect anymore to screen the content of her conversations.

Cris and I speak pidgin Japanese -- of which we still remember about 12 words -- in public from time to time. Did you know the word "skosh" meaning "a little bit" comes from Japanese? Here I had always thought it was Yiddish or something, but when we went to Japan we found that "sukoshi" -- of which the u and the i are not really pronounced -- literally means "a little bit." But it was only recently that I read that it entered the American lexicon not in the aftermath of WWII specifically, but during the Korean War when American soldiers would R & R in Japan.