There’s a certain ambiguity to speaking like the locals in Panama. There’s a certain accent and way of inflection that either makes you sound like you’re one of them or not: but there’s a fine line in the middle which one can stumble upon even if they’re looking for it closely.

It was over my first few weeks in Panama, between talking to friends and strangers alike, that this ‘Dale Pues’ character kept coming up.

“Dale Pues,” people would say at the end of a conversation.

“Dale Pues” they’d type at the end of a note.

Who was this Dale Pues? And why was everyone referring to him in their conversations? I did a Google search for Dale and found only the following photo:

To me, Dale sounded like a guy from South Carolina who wore Croakies. He sounded like a nice fellow, maybe late thirties, who wore a baseball cap and spoke with the type of accent that said he’d been fishing all his life. But what did not come easy to my imagination was how everyone down in Panama not only knew Dale, but also made an effort to say his name. A second Google search I did came up with a different Dale:

One of the best ways I’ve found to assimilate with a foreign society, and more specifically a foreign tongue, is not to question behavior but rather mimic it…immediately. When you really start asking for the meaning of hand gestures and the true explanations of words, there’s a certain naturalness that’s lost—a hiccup in the flow of cultural immersion. Another Dale photo:

A byproduct of this approach meant mentioning Dale’s name regularly and effortlessly in the course of the day. It was less incorporating him (or her?) plausibly into a sentence and more about simply inserting the name between words. “What a fun weekend, Dale Pues. We must do that again!” or “What are you ordering for dinner? Dale Pues. I’m gonna have the lamb.” A third Google search I did came up with this Dale (the one on the left):

This technique worked remarkably well. People were seriously impressed with my use of Dale Pues, and while asking them what exactly it meant would have certainly blown my cover, I did wonder endlessly what the hell I was saying. I am still not sure which Dale Pues everyone is referring to, but I’ll keep you posted on my search. To be continued…

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Filed under: Culture on June 16th, 2008