What’s that you said?

Tonight’s slice was inspired by Fran’s slice from yesterday. Her post was about mixing up words when speaking a new language. I have studied a handful of languages, some more carefully and committedly than others, and I have also had the opportunity to pick up some bits of a different handful of languages. My brain likes languages, but I’ve written more than once about the fact that it’s often not good at understanding the need to pull from only one language at a time.

Fran’s post mentioned her swapping in “enseñar” (teach) for “aprender” (learn). I have a similar history of word swaps, I repeated confuse pairs of words in Spanish. I haven’t noticed this happen with any other language, and it would be cool to understand why this happens in only one language … if anyone has any guesses, I’d love to hear.

The three most comical instances of my word-swapping:

I was visiting a dear friend in Mexico. Standing outside her house, holding one of her 18-month-old twins, a butterfly (mariposa) flitted past our faces. I called it out to Inez, pointing and telling her to look at … the mantequilla … which, of course, is not the word for butterfly but for butter.

I used to walk with a cane. I was sitting in the airport in Mexico City waiting for a plane to Veracruz when man asked me why I needed the cane. I explained that my rolling pin was very bad (rodillo) when I thought Iw as saying something about the badness of my knee (rodilla). I mean, come on. It’s one letter!

At an old ob of mine, there was a year when I gave a lot of presentations in Spanish. We were hoping to get community mmbers to participate in a giant community development project that was getting off the ground, and most presentations were in Spanish because most of the community members were Spanish speakers. I practiced a lot for those presentations, wanted to be clear about how people could be involved with our development team.

A team. What a great idea. A team. So relatable.

Heh. Relatable. Unless I’m the one telling you about it. Because I stood up and talked about how we hoped folks would join our “equipaje.” I said the word “equipaje” over and over. I must have seemed to be in love with the word. It fell so easily off my tongue.

And everyone seemed into my presentation, smiling, engaged.

And then it was over and people clapped. One of the women in the group came up to talk to me … and told me that she thought I had probably meant to say “equipo” and not “equipaje” … because I’d just spent my whole talk inviting people to be part of our group’s luggage.

I’m pretty sure the Spanish language wasn’t developed specifically to get me caught in comical errors. I know it’s not really a nefarious plot to make me look silly. But it sure gets the job done!

(Thanks for the inspriration Fran! And I had the pleasure of meeting Fran and a dozen other slicers earlier tonight in the slicer Zoom Lainie hosted! 🙂 )

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