We Spent Yesterday Evening With Jim And Cher,

and chatted about all manner of things,

at one time we talked about languages and accents, I mentioned that many years ago saying a word incorrectly could get you killed, I thought the word was nettles as in stinging nettles, but it was not, the word was parsley, in October 1937, the president of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo, devised a simple way to identify the Haitian immigrants living along the border of his country, Dominican soldiers would hold up a sprig of parsley, perejil in Spanish and ask people to identify it, those who spoke Spanish would pronounce the word's central "r" with that language's characteristic trill; the Haitians, on the other hand, would bury the "r" sound in the throaty way of the French, to be on the receiving end of the parsley test would be to seal, either way, one's fate, the Spanish-speaking Dominicans were left to live, and the Haitians were slaughtered, it was a state-sponsored genocide that would be remembered in one of history's greatest understatements, as the Parsley Massacre.