As a child in Johannesburg in the 1950s and 60s I was quite used to hearing English spoken in a variety of accents. However, it was almost always spoken with the local South African inflections, all clear to my young ears. In 1962, when I was fourteen, I moved to Israel and quickly learned to deal with a new variety of English and, of course, to speak Hebrew. Ten years later, I arrived in North Carolina to attend graduate school at Duke University in Durham, where almost everybody spoke with a Southern drawl, but after a while I got the hang of that, too.

I had a few days to settle into a tiny apartment I rented behind an A&P store (where the spaghetti was on the foreign foods shelf!) and to purchase a car before the Spring semester began. A month after my arrival, the professor I had chosen to advise me signed the necessary documents and became my official PhD mentor. It was time to jump into the world of research – but first I had to figure out what everyone was saying.

The range of accents at Duke astounded me. As an ornithologist, I was skilled in identifying many a bird by its song, but it took me a while to realize that my research colleagues from different parts of the world were each speaking their own version of our common tongue. My adviser was a Norwegian who could easily have found a job with the BBC, unlike a postdoctoral fellow from Montana who spoke with a nasal western drawl like Clint Eastwood in Rawhide. Another post-doc from Australia passed me in the hallway with a "G'dye maite" and left me bewildered. Also, there was a Scotsman on sabbatical, who ran down the hall in a white coat on Yom Kippur with a pigeon held above his head shouting "rrrepent, rrrepent". I asked a Canadian graduate student where he was going for lunch. His answer was "oot and aboot". I was curious and went with him; we had a hamburger at the student union.

On top of all this, there were Southerners on the faculty whose conversations sounded like the twanging of steel-stringed guitars.

Before I went to Duke, I studied the campus map, which is dominated by the Chappell Tower. But what I found was the Tower of Babel!

Because the undergraduate courses in biology I'd taken at Tel Aviv University far exceeded the scope of those required by biology majors in the US intent on research, my adviser tossed me headfirst into the lab telling me to find my way about. Thus, my first order of business was to join one of the researchers as an apprentice. I chose to work with a senior graduate student from Newark, Mike Fedak, who was studying the energetic cost of running in birds of varied sizes, from 40 g Chinese painted quail to 22 kg rheas, South America ostrich-like birds. This study laid the foundation for my own work on the energetics of waddling penguins, but that's another story.

I found it difficult not to be in the disciplined environment of classroom study and requested to take courses that I thought would be of use in my research. I enrolled in two courses for my first semester, pharmacology and electronics for physiologists taught in the MD-PhD program of the Duke Medical School. Electronics was taught by Dr. John Moore, who helped build Hodgkin's and Huxley's oscilloscope, and pharmacology, which was taught by Dr. Oshio Narahashi who reopened that morass of linguistic ambiguity. When Dr. Narahashi said "molality", I could not tell whether he meant molality, molarity or morality – possibly even mortality

Eventually, I got used to the local and academic accent environments and my own flattened into an amalgam of South African, Israeli, and North American. I also learned to spell in American, a bad habit I have not been able to shake. In 1977, we (Hana, my wife, and Gal, our first-born) went home to Israel and I began the tortuous path of building my own laboratory at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

In 2000, I attended the annual summer conference of Society for Experimental Biology in Cambridge, with several of my graduate students and post-docs. Lizanne Roxburgh (South African) and Drs. Carmi Korine (born Hebrew speaker), Kent Hatch (from Utah) and Ian van Tets (a product of Monash and Wollongong Unis in Oz) accompanied me. We often jibed at each other about language, pronunciation, and spelling, but that ended abruptly one afternoon when a group of us went punting on the River Cam and were outdone (or rather undone) by a colleague.

On a day when there were no sessions in our field of common interest, several of us went out for a lazy lunch. At a pub on the bank of the Cam, we ate some drab fare but drank a few fine lagers that later led to a collective lapse of judgement. We were joined by two South African friends, the late Dr. Barry Lovegrove, and his PhD student Andrew McKechnie from the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg. We left the pub together directly onto a boat rental dock. The Cambridge-types on the river in their boating blazers made punting look easy as they glided smoothly along. So, emboldened by beer, and without any sensible aforethought or prior punting experience, five of us (Lovegrove, Mackechnie, Korine, Dr. David Goldstein from Dayton, Ohio, and me) rented a punt. The renter mumbled minimal instructions, gave one of us the pole and as he pushed us off, he said something about being careful. But it was already too late.

Very quickly we discovered that punting is an art, but even though none of us knew the first thing about handling the pole, we each had a lot to say to the one of us whose turn it was to punt. Mostly we went around in circles and drifted along with the languid current. We each took a turn, but being tipsy did little to help. Finally, Goldstein got the gist and pushed us on a reasonably straight course.

Awesome!

He proudly half-turned to look at us and. . . . .

SCRUNCH!

We had rammed the side of a punt carrying half a dozen Japanese high school students, immaculately dressed in their uniforms. Fortunately, no one fell into the Cam, but the students all fell in a pile, topped by their punter. They were probably cursing us up and down in Japanese but did it very quietly.

Four of us were suddenly, soberly and shamefully silent, but not Lovegrove. Up he jumped waving his arms and shouted

"SUPPLIES!".

Need I write more?