Mexico 2002: ¿Habla español? Part II

Mexico 2002

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Stories, Observations, and Miscellany

¿Habla español? Part II: Fun with Spanish

Like any language, Spanish in the hands of its native speakers is often clever and colorful. You can study a language in a classroom, and you can even make an effort to get a grip on the everyday speech and slang that you encounter in books. But there's nothing like immersion among the home-grown speakers for watching the words you see on a page come alive.

For example, a primer for people learning English might tell them to express approval by saying "It is very nice" or perhaps "That's great!" But anyone who spends ten minutes in the U.S. knows that the single most common way to express approval is to pronounce something "Cool!" In Mexico, this comes out for some reason as padre — ¡Qué padre! Every third thing is padre or perhaps even padrísimo if particularly, you know, cool. Oscar alerted us to the word guey, an apparently not overly nice way to refer to "guy" or "buddy" — "Hey, buddy" on the streets of Mexico City comes out as ¡Oye, guey! One of those slang terms that a foreigner probably wants to be pretty careful when using.

A Spanish-language issue that Americans, especially, have trouble mastering is the complex and subtle set of rules governing when to address someone in the formal (Usted) versus in the informal (tú). (To get a sense of the issue, think about when you might address someone by first name versus by "Mr. Smith" or "Ms. Jones." What do you call your friends' parents? What do your kids' friends call you? Like that.) A similar issue involves when you might address someone as Señorita ("Miss") versus Señora ("Ma'am"). Classroom protocol for students of Spanish is always to err on the side of too formal. The real-world corollary is that as you plow through with your classroom Spanish, you hope that if people are shocked by what you just called them, they get a gander at your face (and maybe your accent) and chalk it up to those durn foreigners.

We did get some clues. Margot has a woman come in a couple of times a week to clean and help cook. She was introduced to us as María, which by American logic might suggest that perhaps she would be tú to us. Absolutely not, as Oscar was careful to tell us. I tried to divine a set of rules from listening to the people around me, but the context was too great and our experience too short to get much of a grip on it. Oscar, in any event, has a variety of ways to refer to people. My favorite was that he addressed waitresses and hotel clerks as amiga (friend), something he could get away with but we probably never could. In any event, I had ample opportunity to go wrong, and probably did quite a bit. I'm sure that I called more than one wizened old lady Señorita without thinking. One of our tour guides, who must have been at least 60 years old, introduced himself as Juan. In my effort to show sufficient respect with this paltry material, I ended up calling him Señor Juan, a weird hybrid that I hope he took in the spirit I used it.

I found myself delighted even with Spanish of the type that native speakers probably wouldn't particularly notice. In Spanish, you can create a word meaning "emporium of" or "shop of" by appending -ería onto the end of a noun. A bakery is a panadería (pan = bread) and a pastry shop is a pastelería. A haircut shop is a peluqería (from the word for wig), a dry cleaner is a tintorería (dye shop), and so on by the dozens.

This -ería suffix is, as the linguists say, "productive" — speakers create new words out of it all the time. We found several examples in the course of walking the streets of Mexico City and Oaxaca. Surely the best one was in Mexico City. Along a particular boulevard downtown are dozens and dozens of vendors who hawk pirated CDs and software. If you are looking for pirated goods, therefore, what area of the city should you visit? None other than the piratería, of course.

Mexican Spanish is as distinct among Spanish speakers as American English is to an Englishman or Australian. There are many markers. One pretty sure sign that you're speaking with a Mexican is that he will at some point probably come out with ¡Ándale! or ¡Órale! These are more on the order of interjections ("c'mon!" or "there you go!") than they are words you can look up in the dictionary.

Another favorite with Mexicans is the use of the diminuitive, which seems to be attached willy-nilly to words not only to express the smallness of a thing but to express its cuteness, or for a half-dozen other reasons. Oscar, who is not a tiny guy, might well be Oscarcito at times to his family. Maybe you're going to be there not just al rato ("in a while") but al ratito ("in a sec"). And as we discovered in at least one instance, miniature golf isn't necessarily mini-golf, as we might have expected, but golfito.

Lucia , Adrian's partner, comes from an Ecuadorian family, so she grew up with a different dialect. On one of our drives, a discussion broke out about how Mexicans use so many terms that aren't "really Spanish," among them ¡Ándale! and ¡Órale! As a non-native speaker, it wasn't up to me to take a position between two groups of native speakers, of course. But the hard-boiled descriptive linguist in me was jumping up and down inside saying "Hey, if 90 million Mexicans use it, it's gotta be Spanish!" ;-)