Hybrid Neanderthal/Denisovan first generation child

[wnylib]

30. I sometimes surprise people in local stores

by using Spanish. Ex: Two women looking at a blouse. One blouse is blue; the other is red. They are discussing the choice in Spanish. I mutter "azul" as I walk past them. This starts a conversation with me about the occasion for the blouse and other details.

I use a kind of "neutral" Latin American Spanish, like a broadcast announcer might use. I've been told that it sounds authentic to native Spanish speakers, but puzzling about place of origin.

You will probably catch my mistake in this incident. One day when I was still adjusting from using classroom Spanish to real world usage, I was giving my Mexican friend a lift to the home of a friend of hers. Her English was still at an early beginner's stage, so she gave me directions in Spanish. When she said, "derecho," I put on my right turning signal. She said, "No, no. ¡Derecho!" I thought maybe she meant that I was turning too soon, so I turned off the turning signal until I got to the next block, then put it on again.

I should explain that, although I live in a small city, we do have a rush hour and we were on a main street in heavy traffic. People around me were getting annoyed at my slowing down, speeding up, and putting my turning signal on and off.

Again, she said, "No. Te dije derecho.'" Me, emphatically: "No entiendo. Estoy yendo a la derecha." Her: "Si, es derecha, pero dije derecho."

So I pulled into a parking lot. She wrote the two words on a piece of paper and circled the last letter of each. Like many English speakers, I had not paid attention to the word endings. She said derecho, but I heard derecha, which I was more familiar with.

But she made her own mistake - in her native Spanish - and it was a doozy. I was not present, but heard about it from mutual friends. She had been an instructor at a two year secretarial school in Guadalajara, so she volunteered to produce Spanish bulletins for the Spanish language mass at her church here in my town. She produced several copies of a sheet that had the priest's lines to say and the congregation's responses. One line was, "Jesus los hara´ pescadores de hombres." She had made a typo that left out the first "s" so that it read "pecadores." Another friend saw the typo when handing out the program sheets and grabbed a pen to insert the "s" where it belonged.