los Detroit Red Wings

So I've often thought about how, when you're learning another language, you go through this phase in which you think like an adult but you have only rudimentary tools to express yourself. The results are often very cubist. For example, I had a student once who told me her car was blue in the summer and white in the winter. I ask myself if she ever would have organized her perception that way had she not been reduced to such a narrow scope of means of expression.

This exam season the task was to define some English words using only Spanish. Here were a few of my favorites:

-Home run:
"My favorite part of baseball, when a player uses an instrument to hit a white object into the clouds."
"It's when a baseball player cuts the baseball to where the people watching the game are, and the player more or less doesn't walk, but walks very very fast. And the team gets the points."

-I.R.S:
"Part of the government. If people don't pay the correct amount of money to the government, people from the I.R.S. come to their house at the door and say, 'where's your money?'"

-Ear muffs:
"When you're cold in the winter, small clothes you use to protect the things you listen with."

-Jack-o-lantern:
"A food that's in the garden. When Halloween comes, people take this food; cut out eyes, a nose and a mouth on the front of the food; and put a light inside the food. The light escapes through the eyes, nose and mouth and is pretty."

Or my favorite: my student couldn't find the word for wings, so he tried to find the word for "bird arms." He couldn't think of "bird," so he was going to say "animal that flies." Forgetting the word for "to fly," he tried to translate "moves in the sky." But since "sky" was also out of reach, he came up with "where the clouds are." So "wings" became "arms of the animal that moves in the place with clouds."

I didn't have the heart to tell him that Detroit Red Wings is a proper noun and does not need to be translated.

But forget cubism; sometimes the results are downright surreal. For example, a student in my high school class was asked, which is your favorite football team? to which he replied: my shoes are my favorite luggage.

This year there were also some items lost and created in translation. "It's too far, I don't feel like doing anything, me neither, y'all are boring" was memorably rendered: "It is very far, I don't have anything to lose, me neither, I am dying." "In any case I wouldn't tell you because you're a loudmouth" became "At any rate don't get down on yourself because you're chubby" and "Whatever, I didn't tell my diary because you are greedy."

My favorite, though, was the sufficiently pessimistic "life is terrible...people are bored and afraid, and work is pointless" that turned into "my life is terrible...people bore me and I fear them, and there are no jobs." Which I think you'll agree is even worse.

Make no mistake: I was certainly at this point in my Spanish at one time. Back when there were no blogs for my professors to publish my flubs. If you think it's unethical or unfair for me to poke fun, just remember I'm not naming names here. Or I could perhaps mitigate things, or at least even the score, by reminding you of the time I tried to buy Q-tips in Mexico and the girl came back with a box of Tampax.

Not that it matters. My life is terrible. People bore me and I fear them, there's a job for no one, and no one will ever link my blog. Sigh.