In his most valuable, funny, and well crafted book, Breaking Out of Beginner’s Spanish, published by University of Texas Press in Austin, (1994) Joseph J. Keenan serves up page after page of what can be called gringoisms: common misusages of Spanish that English-speakers are susceptible to when trying to speak Spanish. Keenan also makes reference …
Dear Readers: Thanks so much to all of you who cared enough to write in a correction for last week’s error regarding “una taxista.” From California to New York, and from San Miguel de Allende and all over Mexico, we appreciate your close attention, and apologize for any confusion. Words that end in “ista” referring …
A taxi driver, una taxista (always feminine), reported that there was a seemingly very proper, elderly, Canadian lady living in San Miguel de Allende who always called upon him to take her to the airport or bus station as she embarked on a journey, and to pick her up upon her return. What mystified and …
One of the biggest treats for English-speakers just learning to speak Spanish is the enormous number of cognates available to us. And, one of the biggest traps for us are words that we assume to be cognates, but are not. For example, we might tell someone that we are very embarazado/a that we forgot to …
There are a few negative words for Anglo-Americans in the Spanish Language. Two of these words that are repeatable come to mind instantly: Gavacho and Gringo . Gavacho means someone who comes from the French Basque country, and they were seen as “other,” by the Spaniards, when displaced, they arrived in Spain from France in …