A traveller equipped with a comprehensive phrasebook has been rendered speechless by a routine greeting, despite being fully prepared to report a broken arm in three tenses.

The phrasebook devotes eleven pages to medical emergencies, four to legal difficulties, and none to being asked, pleasantly, how one is.

“I know how to say ‘my colleague has been detained,’” said traveller Odalys Berenguer. “I do not have a colleague. I have never been detained.”

The Institute for Portable Language reports that phrasebooks are written for catastrophe because catastrophe is finite, whereas ordinary conversation is not.

“Emergencies have a script,” said Dr. Wolfram Bexhill. “A baker asking how your morning is going has no script, and the traveller must improvise, which is the one thing the book has not prepared her for.”

Berenguer’s exchange lasted four seconds. She responded with a word she believes meant yes, followed by a nod she describes as “too many nods.”

Institute research indicates travellers deploy an average of 3 per cent of learned vocabulary and spend the remainder of the trip mentally rehearsing a sentence they will never get to use.

Berenguer returns home Thursday. She can still, fluently, report a fire.