To say I was skilled in languages at high school would be semantic skewering of the most scurrilous kind.
Rather I was monstrously unskilled at everything else, and languages were all that was left.
Hence by the sixth form, having not understood maths or science and having been bored rigid by history (bad teachers), I found myself studying, in the loosest sense of the word, English, French, German and Latin.
Very few others were doing all four, so I tossed modesty out the window and proclaimed myself a linguist.
Strangely, I still occasionally proclaim myself to be this thing, specifically when my wife, a voracious reader, looks up from her book and asks me what a certain foreign phrase means.
It is one of the reprehensible vagaries of Christchurch that you can get a masters degree in the arts there without ever having studied a foreign language.
To this day, I am stunned how Canterbury University gets grants.
So the question with the badly pronounced phrase wafts across the room.
Often I can deal with it, and just as often, I cannot.
But here is the insuperable intellectual edge the faux linguist has over the foreign-tongueless: the faux linguist can lie like a bastard.
I have taken this lying even further, inserting another intellectual layer to keep me ahead of my wife, the metaphorically panting peloton.
I wrinkle my brow and explain that this is a word or phrase we do not have an equivalent for in English, and that this is extraordinarily difficult to discuss with someone who graduated from Canterbury University, an educational institution roughly the equivalent of a Kinder Surprise with no toy in the middle.
Roughly speaking, I will continue, pointing out that I am just trying to grasp the zeitgeist of it for her as best as anyone could do, even Stephen Fry, the meaning of this is ...
A few hours later I will check Google and re-enter the lounge saying I have been thinking long and hard about that phrase and while the definition I came up with is correct in a strictly literal sense, there is an idiomatic ingredient that may make the meal more palatable, why don't you run ... up the flagpole? And my reputation as a linguist remains intact.
Where did this colossal ability with foreign languages come from? Colbert of course is one of the most revered surnames in all of France, and when I stood beside the black marble tomb of the peerless financier Jean-Baptiste Colbert in Paris' second-finest church, St-Eustache in 1997, I cannot begin to describe the proprietary feeling that swept over me.
That French was the only foreign language I dragged protestingly through to university - I was wretched at Latin and German - therefore comes as no small surprise.
Yet it has to be hastily added that when we spent a week in Paris, I could not understand a word of their absurdly fast jabber.
And my halting please-understand-me questions were met with facial expressions colder than concrete.
My sole overseas triumph in linguistics came the first time we went to Bali and I learned a host of words and phrases on the flight over there, all of which were subsequently met with beaming smiles and clear comprehension from the Balinese, who were of course also quite keen on making a sale.
But the seeds were sown with Italian.
I was 4 years old, and my father was one of those Kiwi-Down-The-Strada men who came back from World War 2, eyes and heart dancing with memories of Italy.
He taught me a succession of Italian phrases, and then we worked up this conversation, like an organ grinder with his monkey, which he summoned me to repeat, while rolling him a cigarette with one hand, when visitors came.
They were doubtless astounded.
And no, we did not have any domestic pets.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
