USA CONDONES

[Tim Frazer]

If USA CONODONES is Spanish, it doesn't parse for me.  I found a "condonar"
verb in my Spanish dictionary, but this, which otherwise looks like a
second-person singular inflection (-es), doesn't fit, unless it's an
imperative (but that would be "condona," right?) or some word sort of
subjunctive, which I never learned very well.

----- Original Message -----
From: Natalie Maynor <maynor at CS.MSSTATE.EDU>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Saturday, September 16, 2000 7:43 AM
Subject: Re: Friday foolishness: foreign words


> 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)