But there is the classic account of his crawling around on the rug in his home and being fascinated by the Arabic script on it. Perhaps the fact that The Salt Lake Tribune published a cartoon that has perpetuated this story. There are also stories about his getting a French tutor when he was five, and others of his teaching himself Greek at age ten.

In high school Nibley belonged to the Shakespeare group, where the members would recite lines from the Bard until one of them made a mistake; consequently, says John Welch, "Nibley still to this day will weave Shakespearean phrases into his talks and articles."

[Gary] Hatch says, "And he reads and speaks, or at least understands, every European language."

As a graduate student, Nibley was mistakenly engaged to teach a Russian course; he learned the language in orger to be able to teach it and was disappointed when the error was discovered and he was not permitted to teach Russian.

When asked how many languages he actually knows, Nibley once reponded, "That's like asking a musician how many songs he can play on the piano."

Richard Cracroft relates, "He gave the first faculty lecture at the university back in the mid-sixties, maybe 1964 or 1965. He gave it in the Smith Family Living Center and he kind of wandered onto the stage after the introduction and there were maybe two, three hundred of us there and he got up and spoke--it wasn't a prepared lecture; it was Hugh Nibley. And he just started talking and then he said, 'Oh you can't understand this unless you understand the Greek.' And then he wrote the sentence on the blackboard in Greek. And then he said, 'Of course this works even better in Latin.' Then he went into Sanskrit. And he was just mumbling to himself about discoveries, and then would look up and say 'See!' And he'd get excited about the point and would point to this and scribble on the board, and you could tell he was off in and exciting adventure. But we could only sense the excitement and could not understand the content. Everybody began to give that amused 'Does anybody understand him?' look at each other--that laugh in the undertoned voice. We were not laughing at Hugh Nibley; we were laughing at his eccentricity and his enthusiasm, and we were appreciative, but we were certainly not enlightened. All we were enlightened by was, 'Well we don't know what he's saying but we have faith it must be right, and this somehow must demonstrate the gospel, and aren't we grateful that Hugh is demonstrating the gospel is true, even though we haven't got the slightest idea what he is saying?' And that was a bunch of educated men and women who were simply swept up in admiration of the manner of the man rather than anything he was saying in terms of content.

It is said that Nibley spoke German and many of its dialects so fluently that he could parachute behind enemy lines and "adopt the dialects and intonations of wherever he was, and was never suspected of being a foreigner."