January 29 - The Platform

Alan could see that the mother wasn't paying enough attention to her young daughter who was standing way too close to the edge of the subway platform. The little girl, probably about four or five years old, was playing some sort of jumping game, skipping from tile to tile on the platform while her mother attended to her other child in the stroller.
The platform area became windy and loud. The train was coming. The little girl continued to jump and play.
Alan stepped closer to the little girl as the train came into view and the mom tried to comfort her crying baby.
The train bore down on them and blaired its horn to warn the girl away from the edge, but instead it distracted her and she lost her balance. She teetered over the edge and everything happened in slow motion. Alan ran over, desperately blurted out a nonsensical barrage of syllables, and threw out his hand.
The girl grabbed it as she fell and he swung her out of the way of the train and back onto the platform as the train went screaming by.
Relevant fact #1 - The girl and her mother were native speakers of Unbuntu, a language indigenous to the Unbunta tribe of northern Botswana.
Relevant fact #2 - While Alan had never been to Africa, much less Botswana, he had conducted some research on Unbuntu several years ago while studying linguistics in graduate school.
Relevant fact #3 - The utterance that he had blurted out just before she grabbed his hand was not gibberish. It was Unbuntu for clutch my wrist.
After the dust had settled, Alan theorized that over the years he had retained a sort of subliminal knowledge of Unbuntu that he had been able to spontaneously draw upon in a moment of intense need. Although he couldn't carry on a proper conversation in Unbuntu with the woman, at the moment that it was needed he was able to produce the language.
Now a PhD student, he procured a grant to do more research.
The hypothesis he sought to prove was that in moments of acute emotional intensity, the brain is able to activate and use latent linguistic knowledge that the person might not even be actively aware that he/she has.
The study proved controversial for a lot of reasons. For one, he was dealing with subconscious learning, the results of which were notoriously difficult to verify. But more damningly, in order to authentically test his hypothesis, he had to put his research subjects in truly dangerous situations. To the linguistics department of his university--and also to the local police and fire departments--this was not, as he later said, an ethically grey area. It was pitch black. When the gas leak he created in the chemistry lab to test his hypothesis that his research subject would be able to call for help in Hakanese (she couldn't) resulted in trips to the hospital for seven students and more than $12,000 in damage to the lab, the game was up. He was summarily dismissed from the program and had to beg and plead for them not to press criminal charges.
Surprisingly, Alan had managed to collect a large pool of data prior to his dismissal; however, in the end, his findings were inconclusive at best. Most of his peers agreed that it was pure coincidence that the nonsense he blurted out on the train platform meant something in an actual language. With more than 6,000 known languages in the world and countless regional dialects, screaming incoherently like a scared little girl is bound to mean something in one of them.