Friday foolishness: foreign words

[Natalie Maynor]

Dennis wrote:
> OK.  Surely y'all haven't forgotten (since I told it here before) that my
> wife and I thought USA CONDONES was a sentence with a strangely missing
> object (on the back of a bus in San Francisco) until we both realized at
> the same moment that the sign was in Spanish.

And there was my slightly different story of looking at newspaper
headlines on the back of a newspaper across from me on a train in
southern Spain in the early '80s, surprised to see that the
Reagans were in Casablanca, where I had just been.  It took me a
minute to realize that they weren't -- that they were at home in
the Casa Blanca.
   --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu)