Knock-Knock

[Mike Salovesh]

Carmen Mattei wrote:
>
> Miguel:
> It's OK.  I also learned the "other" meaning of "coger" the hard way when I
> used the word very casually in conversation with South Americans folks I had
> just met.
>
> Saludos,
>
> Carmen

Another example of the same idea:

Esther Hermitte was one of my classmates in graduate school.  We both
did our doctoral fieldwork in the Mexican state of Chiapas. Esther
studied the community of Pinola (Villa Las Rosas on recent maps); I
worked in San Bartolomé de los Llanos, in the municipio of Venustiano
Carranza.  We were only 25 or 30 miles apart, so we visited back and
forth from time to time.  Esther, from Buenos Aires, was often called
'la Gringa argentina', and I was often called Miguelito or Miguelazo
when people wanted to go beyond "Don Miguel".  (My wife, who learned to
speak Spanish while we were in Chiapas, always was called "Doña
Margarita", perhaps because she found it difficult to switch among
voices and levels of speech so as to match the level of speech formality
to the social nature of an occasion.)

There was some kind of international scholarly conference in Mexico City
during our second field trips to Chiapas.  Esther asked her mother to
come to Mexico City around the time of the conference.  She thought that
would provide a nice opportunity to show her mother around some of the
tourist zones in Central Mexico.  When the conference ended, I
accompanied Esther and her mother on a short visit to Cuernavaca.  One
of the places we visited was the Borda Gardens, which were landscaped in
the fashion of French Royal French gardens at such places as Versailles.
(The gardens were created in the 1860s as part of the estate of a rich
associate of Maximilian of Austria, who was made Emperor of Mexico by
Napoleon III.)

As we left the gardens, Esther's mother suddenly covered her face, ran
to the next street corner, and turned to go down a side street.  I
couldn't see any reason for her behavior.  I still didn't understand
when Esther pointed to the sign in front of a cantina on the street
where we had been walking.

The sign identified the cantina as "Bar La Concha"; it included a folk
art depiction of a conch shell.  The bar, which I had visited on other
trips to Cuernavaca, served excellent seafood.  Its name and the conch
shell symbolized a connection with the ocean, and I didn't see anything
remarkable about it.

I just didn't know what the sign might mean in Argentina.

Later (when her mother wasn't around), Esther explained that "concha",
in  Argentinian Spanish, is an extremely vulgar word for the female
sexual orifice. A woman who called herself "Conchita" would be
announcing to the world that she was the lowest type of cheap
prostitute.

Esther's mother was so shocked by the sign that she had to get away from
it as fast as possible.

As I said, the single label "Spanish" conceals striking contrasts among
many different languages.

-- mike salovesh                    <salovesh at niu.edu>
PEACE !!!