Posts from the “Reflections” Category

Little Fatty

03/19/09

I used to call my boy “Gordito”, which in Spanish means “Little Fatty”. It wasn’t an underhanded homage to his healthy roundness, chubby cheeks, double-chin, and thighs (which as far as I’m concerned are desirable in a baby). It was simply an endearing nickname I gave him out of love and based on tradition (it would be a very common thing to call a child in Colombia, even if they’re not chubby). My Colombian friends wouldn’t even bat an eye when I used the appellative in front of them, but in front of an “Anglo” audience, I would almost invariable be asked what the name meant and they would react to the answer with awkward giggles. For a long time, I forced myself to…

Categories: Reflections

The World Is Not Enough

03/15/09

I have nothing but respect and appreciation for people, businesses, and institutions that take the effort to translate their signs into Spanish. Whether they do it out of respect, appreciation, or just business savvy, I can’t help but feel somewhat flattered. But every once in a while, you run into translations that are such a disaster, they bring to mind the scene from the movie “The Mexican” where Brad Pitt asks a crew of Mexican laborers: “take me in your el truck-o to the next el town-o”. We ran into one such botched translation today at the Children’s Museum. In the newly unveiled Clifford the Dog room, I ran into exhibit A shown in the picture below on the left. My humble translation of…

Categories: Reflections, Trivial Occurrences

The Small Divide

03/06/09

During the three years my wife and I have been together, she has learned a lot of Spanish, but she doesn’t speak it fluently. We both understand and take seriously the need for her to be comfortable with Spanish if we want to be effective as we can be at raising our children bilingual. But life is busy, and having an 18-month old boy and another one on the way leaves hardly any time to keep up with laundry, let alone commit to the major undertaking that is learning a new language as an adult. So we worry a little bit. We certainly haven’t abandoned our plans to help her learn the language as fully as she can, but day after day, we seem…

Categories: Questions, Reflections

Ain’t Ain’t A Word

02/18/09

I guess you could say I’m proud of my blue collar/working class background. Of course, when I was a youth I often felt wretchedly disadvantaged, especially at that age when it becomes important to wear certain brand jeans and sneakers to be considered a worthwhile human being or a worthy suitor to the neighborhood’s prettiest girls. But now that I’m a relatively mature adult, I am deeply grateful not only for the efforts made by my parents to support us but also for the lessons that my working class environment thought me. Of course, this website is only partially about self-congratulating for how remarkable I am. My point here is that because of my background, I grew up speaking a certain brand of Spanish…

Categories: Questions, Reflections