A to Z: Words

Word: the smallest element that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content (with literal or practical meaning).

~ Wikipedia

Ah, but what content--and what meaning. The simplest words (blue, for example) have countless meanings: the color, a feeling, adult movies, lack of air. Even taking a word at its "face" meaning--say, sin--the connotations might be completely different--nay, opposite. If I say this chocolate cake is sinfully good, it's a positive thing. But if I say it's a sin to treat animals that way, the word clearly has a negative meaning.

Words are like slithery, slippery creatures. And their power multiplies exponentially when we introduce other languages.

Translation is a tricky business. Take, for example, value. Translated into Spanish it becomes valor--the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something (according to my Mac dictionary). But in Spanish, valor is also courage, guts. Guts, on the other hand, can translate into agallas, or in the more physiological sense, into tripas--which is tripe in English.

You might be familiar with the embarrassed/embarazada dichotomy. Yep, obvious similarities aside, to be embarrassed is not to be embarazada--which means pregnant. It doesn't help that embarrassed doesn't translate easily into Spanish.

If you want to say I'm so embarrassed in Spanish, you'd say something like Qué pena, or Qué verguenza, which would translate into English as what an embarrassment. In short, embarrassed isn't an adjective in Spanish.

Then there's last. The last example translates into último--but último is also used for latest, as in the latest news, or the latest fashion. Small thing, but think of the confusion: the last news we heard implies there will never again be more news, or at least, none that you'll hear.

Spanish is a quirky language. Its quirkiness isn't helped at all by the fact that Spanish isn't just one language. At school in Mexico I learned Spanish grammar, and I noticed ample differences between what the book said and the way people spoke. The plural you, for example, is ustedes--or vosotros, if you're from Spain. The book was from Spain, so instead of saying ustedes irán (you all will go), the book required vosotros iráis. Yeah--one more tense to add to the fourteen already existent in Spanish.

For nearly 30 years, I thought that was it--Spain Spanish vs. the rest of us. Then I came to Curaçao, and made friends from Venezuela, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Cuba... And I realized every single country that speaks Spanish speaks it differently.

It's not just the accent, although that doesn't help, either. When Dominicans, for example, substitute the R for an L, or when Venezuelans plain skip over the S... Well, it makes for a lot of confusion.

But it's more serious than that. Words have different meanings--completely diametrical meanings, in some cases. Take cola, for example (tail in English). A Venezuelan friend asked me one evening, me das la cola? I did a double-take. Would you give me the tail? Seriously? She laughed and laughed--turns out in Venezuela it means would you give me a RIDE, as in will you drive me home.

Cola also means glue in Spain and some other places--which made for a crazy translation of Crazy Glue--Cola Loca, or Crazy Tail. In South America, Cola is also Coke, so I hear people asking for tail at restaurants all the time.

There's also the confusion with meal times. In Mexico, you have desayuno in the morning, comida at midday, and cena at night. But in Venezuela and Colombia, comida is the evening meal, and the Mexican comida becomes almuerzo--which in Mexico is used more for brunch. Very confusing when you're trying to make plans to meet for lunch. It's not any wonder most of us have resorted to using English.

I went to a garden center to look into planting a lawn on our front yard. I asked the Dominican assistant there for pasto--grass, and he had no clue what I was talking about. He called his boss, the Portuguese owner who speaks passable Spanish, and I repeated the question. Again--blank look.

"It's the green stuff that grows in gardens--lawns," I said, feeling half-frustrated, half-stupid.

"What color are the flowers?" he asked.

"No, no flowers. Just--" I gestured with my hands, "long blades. Green blades." Then I spotted a lawn across the street. "THAT is what I need. Pasto."

He threw his head back and laughed. "You want grama. For a lawn."

Grama? I'd never even heard the word before. Without the visual aid, I'd have been forced to stealing a chunk of grama from someone's yard.

We writers are more-than-normally aware of the power of words, of using the right word for the precise moment. We know the absolute authority they possess, the weight they carry. We aspire to, if not master this power, at least harness it.

And yet most of us are like Phaeton: harnessing a chariot whose power is beyond our comprehension, and which can--and will, if we don't curb our enthusiasm and pig-headedness--destroy us.