Take me back one more time, Spanish rose...

I love foreign languages.  If there were enough time in the day, I would master dozens of them just because I find it fun and mentally stimulating to learn a new way to speak.  This is probably the reason why I majored in Spanish as an undergrad and still took a German course during my junior year just for kicks.

Katie knows full well of my love of foreign languages.  And she loves to have fun with me as a result of it. Whether it is creating some sort of Spanish catch phrase that she uses constantly or completely butchering some statement in Spanish to see if I can figure out what she's saying, she will do it.  It's quite funny, too.

Take, for example, yesterday... we were driving into downtown Geneva to run some errands.  She needed to pick up a special order item from a home decorating store and I wanted to drop off some CDs I checked out of the library.

Katie: "So where do you want to go first?"

Me: "I don't care."

Katie: "Voy a boobie-ortega!"

Me: "Say what?"

Katie: "Voy a boo-bie-or-TE-ga!"

Me: "What the hell are you trying to say?  Wait!  Library?  Biblioteca!"

Katie: "Si!  Voy a boobie-ortega!"

I couldn't stop laughing.  I tried to correct her on it a few more times, but gave up.  It became a running joke the rest of the night.

Okay, we're strange that way.  Deal with it.

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Ha ha. I took 4 years of Spanish in high school and do not remember it that well, but I do remember phrases like:
"caca cabeza"
"mi casa e tu casa"
I can't wait to go to Barcelona and try some more. My fiance knows a bit of German, so we play the same kind of game, where he says something in German and I try to figure out what the hell he is saying.


Mispronouncing words of foreign origin is the American way! You should be totally proud of her! I still get a laugh out of hearing people pronounce Japanese words, which are almost always wrong. To this day I still get freaky looks when I say words like "karaoke" and "Tokyo", because it's habit to pronounce them properly.


I took Spanish in high school and thought it was positively brilliant to appropriate some pleasant-sounding Spanish words as English expletives.

"Oh fregadero! You are SUCH an ajo!"


Kilax, clearly you remember all the important things. ;-)

Dave, I agree and so does Katie. It is the American way. I'm singing a derivation of Lee Greenwood right now... "and I'm proud to be an ignorant American, where at least I know I'm free to bastardize other languages."

Rabbit, oddly enough, I took a class on code switching in college. That's when someone flip flops back and forth between their own language and another. Pretty interesting stuff. I wonder how much, though, is intentional and how much is for dramatic flair. I know I like peppering my speech with the occasional Spanish, German, Italian, or French word just to make me sound more interesting. Sadly it doesn't work as well as I would hope.



The best I can offer is "Touche," the French term that basically means "good come back." In my family, we pronounce it "Touch." When people correct me, I look at them all serious and say, "Are you sure? I don't think that's right." If you keep your voice straight enough, they start to doubt themselves. When pressed I say it's a portmanteau of "touche" and "ouch," but the truth is I just don't think Modern French has earned the right to be pronounced correctly.


Reminds me of a scene from the fatally flawed film "The Pirate Movie" in which Eric (Christopher Atkins) is teaching Mabel (Kristy McNichol) to fence like a pirate. She says "en garde!" He replies with, "no, it's touche... meaning 'touch'." And the crowd coos. Maybe that's where it came from.

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