🎂📚 Countdown to Sixty – Part 4 is live 🌍🎸

Tomorrow is the last one of the series, so enjoy today’s penultimate ramble while the cake defrosts. 😅

What’s inside (no spoilers, just crumbs):

How a Valentine’s Day misread in Mexico taught me that meanings change by postcode.

The Shenzhen Metro puzzle: Chinese/Cantonese/English station names that are not twins… cue several heroic wrong exits.

Home life in Itanol (Italian + Spanish), with strategic Japanese nouns and the occasional sentence that forgets which language it started in.

Choosing family over the travelling-manager life, on purpose.

Health as a strict teacher: I faced colon cancer; my daughter faced her own battles (not for me to disclose). Perspective ensued.

Why law, linguistics, philosophy (yes, filosofia del diritto), history—and even music and statistics—are languages that make work and life less dumb.

If Part 3 was a boardroom western, Part 4 is a library with a passport stamp: fewer firewalls, more footnotes, friends, and food stalls. Work is part of life; the rest is life. Both get better when we ditch stereotypes and read carefully.

👉 Article 4/5 — below.

Drop your best “wrong exit” or “language fail” in the comments. Bonus points if noodles were involved.

Countdown to Sixty – Part 4: The Chorus: Language, Travel, Law, and the Art of Reading the World

Antonio Ieranò

August 24, 2025

I know you were waiting for it, and I know you’re desperate. We are almost at the end of this saga.

Tomorrow I’ll publish the final episode, but for today, here you go.

Language inspirations (same merry culprits as before): a wink from Jerome K. Jerome for the wry eyebrow, a splash of Douglas Adams for the absurdities that are somehow true, and one Monty Python coconut to bonk nonsense on the head. This time I add Umberto Eco as our librarian-in-chief: The Name of the Rose held up like a lantern for how we read signs, words, and one another.

Opening: what you don’t understand can bruise you

Language and cultural barriers don’t only confuse; they can hurt. Ask my earlier self on Valentine’s Day. As an Italian, I treated it as a commercial chorus of roses and awkward dinners. In Mexico, however, it is also a day for celebrating friendship. I discovered this the hard way, by not showing up to a moment that mattered to people I cared about—because I read the date with my map, not theirs. It was a small mistake with a loud lesson: if you don’t learn the local meaning, you will inevitably tread on someone’s heart, even when your intentions are good.

Eco’s candle: the Shenzhen exits that wouldn’t agree

Eco would say the world is a library of signs; the trick is to read the right edition. Consider the Shenzhen Metro. Announcements are trilingual—Chinese, Cantonese, and English—which is splendid until you realise the English station name isn’t always a faithful twin of the Chinese one, and the signage you trust in one language has a slightly different cousin in another. I learned this by repeatedly surfacing from the wrong exit like a determined meerkat who loves disappointment. The fix was comic and practical: either ask for the English name that locals actually use, or write the Chinese characters and point. After that, my subterranean life improved markedly. The lesson? Languages don’t just translate; they interpret.

The passports I carry (and the ones I covet)

Italian is my native music: nuance, irony, and a constitutional right to scenic sentences. English gives reach—excellent for work and surprisingly agile for jokes; perfect when you must explain why something is currently on fire. Spanish brings warmth and rhythm; the room’s temperature changes with it. I also treat math, statistics, and music as languages—less fluent, more hopeful. I would love to be proficient in all of them. I am not. But I keep practising chords, reading footnotes, and asking my graphs whether they’re telling the truth or merely flattering my hopes.

Philosophy, filosofia del diritto, linguistics, history: my other toolkits

I have read—if rarely ordained—my way through philosophy, filosofia del diritto (philosophy of law), linguistics, and history. They don’t make me wise; they make me slower, which is often better. Law and regulation (current crushes include legaltech, GDPR, NIS2, the AI Act, and friends) are not mere checklists; they are stories societies tell themselves about risk, fairness, and power. Eco would shelve them under semiotics with consequences. Reading a statute with patience has helped me make sense of the world, my work, and the occasional family argument—because half of every fight is two people using the same word to mean different things.

Family: chosen, lived, layered

My wife is from Osaka. Her family is no longer there, but our friends are close as family—an enormous blessing, because relatives are assigned; friends are chosen. Our daughter can proudly feel Japanese, Mexican, and European in the same heartbeat, which is a wonderful antidote to hard borders and soft minds. At home we speak Itanol—a cheerful, accidental hybrid of Italian and Spanish. Japanese appears for specific things (objects, jokes, kitchen debates)—mostly because my comprehension beyond those islands remains… aspirational. Sometimes the mix-ups are hilarious; sometimes we forget which language we started in. It’s a good kind of lost.

Health as a very strict teacher

We all cross health issues; I’ve had colon cancer to confront. That sentence rearranged my furniture. My daughter has had her own battles (not mine to disclose), and watching her suffer woke up a different kind of listening. Priorities change when fear visits the house. Some things become luminous; others evaporate. I took care of my grandma, and I’m glad to be caring for my mum now. It is lighter to carry than it sounds; time spent helping is rarely wasted time. Calendars lie about that.

Choosing my people over my passport stamps

There was a path where I stayed a permanently travelling manager. I made a different choice. I chose family, knowing that staying rooted in Italy would cut me out of many career possibilities. There were more important things at stake. Life is a buffet of supposedly “can’t-miss” opportunities; you can, in fact, miss many of them and be happier. I still travel, but with a different compass.

Postcards from the road (work trips, life lessons)

Mexico City. My first time there (yes, the English name grates, but here we are), I was ecstatic. Everything felt astonishing: colour, noise, kindness, contradictions. None of the postcard clichés survived contact with reality—no desert soundtrack, no national siesta, no tumbleweed auditioning for a Western. Instead: a living metropolis with a rhythm that gets into your bones.

China. First impression: modernity—faster, taller, brighter than I had assumed. Then a trivial mystery: why couldn’t I get cold water or a cold beer? (You can; you simply need to know where and how to ask. As in most countries, the “default” belongs to the locals. If you want a different default, learn the phrase, learn the shop, learn the smile.)

USA. First thought: this isn’t so different after all. But I met San Francisco first, which is not a standard reference for America. Every country contains multitudes; every city is a dialect of the nation.

Rule of travel: keep your eyes open and your superiority off. “Defaultism”—the habit of treating your own defaults as universal—is common (yes, in the USA, but not only). It’s also boring. You will find things you like, things you don’t, and a great middle of “it depends.” That middle is where you grow.

China is not what you think; friends are not a footnote

Whatever you think China is, it is larger than that. Whatever you think Chinese people are, they are more various than that. Two friends, Wangfred and Liuqinbo, opened doors I would never have found alone. I won’t forget their friendship or their patience with my questions. Countries change you; people change you more.

Stereotypes: the shortest road to a poorer life

Stereotypes promise speed; they deliver poverty of mind. Eco would call them lazy semiotics: cheap signs pasted over complicated realities. They breed Manichaean judgments and useless conflicts. They also make your life smaller—less curiosity, fewer friends, duller dinner tables. When you feel a stereotype approaching, ask it to wait outside while you meet an actual human.

The Web-2.0 megaphone and the thinning of language

Web 2.0 was not a technological revolution; it was cultural. Everyone could publish; far fewer learned to edit. The language itself has thinned—hot takes without verbs. Lately even charlatans seem to be cutting corners; being a polished fraud apparently costs too much. I’m not convinced AI will fix this. It may simply amplify knowing without understanding—great prose, weak ideas. Eco’s advice still wins: slow down, check sources, compare manuscripts, decide after thinking.

Work is part of life; the rest is life

Work gave me aeroplanes and whiteboards; life gave me reasons to board the plane and clear the whiteboard. Keeping them separate is tidy; mixing them is human. When I carry curiosity from meetings into markets, and patience from family into projects, both improve. (I once tried to explain GDPR with a guitar riff. It did not become industry standard, but it made the room breathe.)

Small politics, not helium

I like politics, the real kind: conversations, compromises, and boring minutes that prevent disasters. Propaganda is helium—loud, large, and weightless. Most civic life is small and local: a neighbour’s message, a school form, a council timetable, a queue with opinions. Eco again: trust footnotes over slogans. They take longer and save time.

A tiny “openness playbook” (told, not bullet-pointed)

In any new place I learn three polite phrases: hello, thank you, and “what do you recommend?” I read one page of local history before I land and the whole menu after. I ask a real person for the un-Instagram view. I eat something that terrifies my inner bureaucrat (within reason—bureaucrats have saved more lives than influencers). I keep a small notebook of signs: street tiles, ticket icons, queue geometry, the way people gesture no. That, too, is a language.

At home we practice openness in miniature: we speak Itanol, we label a few stubborn items in Japanese, we laugh when a sentence changes language mid-air. It is not tidy; it is alive.

Lately: regulation as a lens, not a cage

My late-career fondness for legaltech and regulation isn’t a kink for forms; it’s a taste for clarity. Done well, rules clarify responsibility and reduce noise. Done badly, they cosplay solutions. Reading law with Eco’s patience—define terms, cite sources, check assumptions—has improved my work and my family life. It is shocking how often an argument evaporates when everyone agrees what a single word actually means.

“When you’re grown up, you’ll understand”

Around sixty, my father used to tell my brother and me: “When you’re grown up, you’ll understand.” I’m nearly there and suspect I’m not fully grown up yet. Some things still do not sit right. Sorry, Dad—the world is different now, and I am different in it—but you weren’t wrong about the direction of travel. Perhaps I still have growing to do.

Which raises a cheerful question: what will I do when I’m fully grown-up, old, and grumpy? Will I stop writing? Unlikely. I will probably swap some sermons for stories and some certainties for footnotes. I might even tune the guitar properly.

A stubborn gratitude

Every place I visited has felt like a blessing, even the odd ones. Caring for people recalibrated my compass. Languages kept my mind elastic. Law (read, if rarely ordained) taught me to define before I decide. Music keeps me honest; statistics reminds me when I’m making it up. Friends turned foreign streets into familiar rooms. Family made the map matter.

Tomorrow brings Part 5—the future that can be and the future that probably won’t. If I do end up a fully grown-up, old, grumpy bloke, I hope I’m the kind who still learns a new verb on Tuesdays, asks one more question than he answers, and never again exits the wrong side of a Shenzhen station… unless there’s a good noodle shop over there.