Mangling Spanish and Grateful Monday

I’ve got a local station on, Tejano music playing

I do my best to sing along but I don’t know what they’re saying

No le puedo entender but you know that it's alright

I’m headed down to San Antone, runnin’ with the night

—Robert Earl Keen Jr.

One of the problems I have speaking Spanish is remembering the gender of inanimate objects and concepts. (When writing, I have more time to think about it and look it up as needed.) In Spanish, everything has gender.

• A car (carro or coche) and the sky (cielo) are male.
• A hamburger (hamburguesa) and the earth (tierra) are both female—but dirt (suelo) is male.

Of course, the sky and the earth retain their pagan genders in many languages. Even in the English spoken in predominantly Christian nations, we refer to Mother Earth.

And Spanish has examples of gender confusion:

• La radio (the radio) — a masculine noun with a feminine article
• El policia (the policeman) — a feminine noun with a masculine article that indicates a male

Grateful Monday

Today when I was buying coffee, one of the staff dropped a big pile of pans. The other workers all made exaggerated noises of shock, but she calmly said, “No es un grando causa.” I believe the grammatically correct way to say this would have been, “No es una causa grande,” but, again, I am no expert. I simply smiled at gnarled Hispanic matron across the room and wished her a silent muchas gracias.

Punctuation Interlude

If you think quotation marks add emphasis, you really, really need to read today’s post.

This post originally appeared in the now-defunct Central Texas Instructional Design blog on this date.

Let’s take a break from multiple choice questions to revisit punctuation—quotation marks, in particular. When not setting off quoted text, what do they do?

One of my clients asked for my opinion on a marketing brochure. Marketing isn’t my specialty, but I agreed to look it over. One of the first things I noticed was an abundance of quotation marks bracketing single words and a couple of phrases. I asked, “When describing your new product, why is new in quotation marks? Why are so many other words in quotation marks?”

“I want to emphasize those words. The quotation marks will call the reader’s attention to those words.”

True enough, but what kind of attention do quotation marks draw? I told a story that one of my undergrad technical writing profs related in class. I wish I could take credit for it, but here is a short version of the story:

An editor and a writer were arguing over the use of quotation marks in a headline. The editor said they emphasize the meaning of the quoted word. The writer said they call the word into question. After much arguing, the writer said, “I can make my point if you give me control over tomorrow’s headline.” The overly-confident editor agreed. The next day, the banner headline read:

Editor Seen Leaving Motel with “Wife”

The next draft of the marketing brochure I saw had replaced the quotation marks with boldface type.