I was sitting in a conference room with my new labmates, eager to engage about the exciting research we were all working on. Halfway through the meeting—my first as a Ph.D. student—I tried to contribute a couple of sentences. Suddenly, the room went quiet and I got lots of funny looks. I was overcome with embarrassment as I realized what had happened. Speaking about water movement in a river basin, I meant to say “upstream” and “downstream.” But instead my brain had gone with a word-by-word translation of the terms in my first language, Farsi: “high-hand” and “low-hand.” This was just the first of many times my brain failed to summon the right English words.