What's more, in an effort to encourage people to start working out, the municipality has installed statues of humans in an array of interesting aerobic positions. Just to make absolutely sure the message is getting across, they've also organized for keep-fit-type music to be blasted out across the park. Unfortunately, the type of music they have chosen is American rap, and somewhere along the line someone has got their wires badly crossed, lyrically speaking. Because, unfortunately, what to the non-native speaker might have sounded like mild exhortations to a young woman to engage in exercise sounded to native ears like a blatant demand that she partake in the sort of activities normally engaged in by consenting adults behind closed doors. This being a family newspaper, I won't bother you with the precise words at issue. Let's just say that they were typical of the sort of thing that has caused concerned mothers in the US to demand that records be sold with warning labels rather like those normally associated with films.What to do? Pretend I hadn't noticed anything amiss and move swiftly on? Assume that no other native speakers were likely to pass by and ignore it? But, of course, I'm a sucker for punishment and decided that it was my responsibility to point out the problem to the owners of the nearest café. Of course, I didn't want to translate the offending phrases either to the owner or to his headscarved mother. Suffice to say that there was a lot of bandying about of the words “ayıp [shameful]” and even “günah [sinful]” before the message finally got through and the rap artist was cut off in mid-obscenity and replaced with something more appropriate to a public park.
It was not the first time I've come across this problem. Recently I was brought up short in the doorway of a crockery shop in Lüleburgaz as words I would not want my elderly auntie to listen to assailed my ears. The other shoppers pressed on with their purchasers blissfully unaware of what was being crooned to them over the loudspeaker.
It was the same story in the Nevşehir branch of the generally conservative Beğendik supermarket. “I couldn't believe it. Really offensive,” a friend spluttered when she returned from her shopping trip after an aural encounter with 50 Cent. Like me, she tried to take up the problem with the manager, only to be met with blank looks and nervous giggles. One of those weird yabancı things, you see, worrying about the words of a song.
Nor is that the only lyrical problem we have to put up with. I was tucking into a plate of warm hummus with pastırma in our poshest local restaurant recently when slowly the music playing in the background began to penetrate. “Good King Wenceslas looked out,” I heard. “On the Feast of Stephen. When the snow lay round about…” The temperature was touching the 40s Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit), but no matter. A Christmas carol! The perfect thing to serve up to diners in the heat of a Cappadocian summer!
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia. 
