In his novel In The Skin of a Lion (1987), Michael Ondaatje writes of the piece-by-piece language sharing among immigrants to Toronto in the 1920s.
Language as puzzle, each piece placing the next. Once you know about the iguana, the obsession with vetch makes more sense.
Related: Categorized Glossary
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He found himself muttering "The farmer takes the dog .. the farmer takes the dog" among the Macedonians, as if perfecting a pssword. The southeastern section of the city where he now lived was made up mostly of immigrants and he walked everywhere not hearing any language he knew, deliriously anonymous. The people on the street, the Macedonians and Bungarians, were his only mirror. He worked in the tunnels with them.
He had discovered the Macedonian word for iguana, gooshter, and finally used it to explain his requests each evening at the fruit stall for clover and vetch. It was a breakthrough. The woman gazed at him, corrected his pronunciation, and yelled it to the next stall. She came around the crates and outlined the shape of a lizard. Gooshter? Four women and a couple of men then circled him trying desperately to leap over the code of languages between them. His obsession with vetch had puzzled them.
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Related: First Violence to Foreigners