9.20.2007

Exhibit 3.3

While I was walking our two dogs, a group of 4 or 5 preschool-aged children from our neighborhood ran towards me, and one asked in Spanish if they could pet the dogs (I assume). The dogs at this point were really freaked out by the children, and I'm very nervous about them biting a child so it didn't seem like a good idea. Unfortunately, I don't actually know any Spanish, but rather than make the obvious assumption that at least one of the children (and probably all) had better English skills than I had Spanish, I decided I'd tough it out with my Spanish gleamed from movie titles, band names, and the Amigos menu.

"No, gracias," I said. "Perro malvado." To complete this inter-cultural exchange, I widened my eyes ominously.

The children seemed confused and ran away.

This was not the correct way to say this for at least two reasons:
1) Malvado apparently means evil, not just bad. So I'm now the hombre in the neighborhood with a blood-thirsty pack of 9-kilo dogs.
2) I used the singular (I think), which means they either thought I was calling the child who asked an evil dog, was talking to a different and unseen evil dog, or I was calling myself an evil dog.

In other words, imagine approaching a man walking two dogs and asking to pet the barking dogs which are straining at their leashes towards you. The man looks confused for a moment before shouting in a heavy accent, "No thanks, Evil Dog!" The man then widens his eyes and walks away.

Would you invite that man to your next neighborhood fiesta?

6 comments:

A. Peterson said...

The lessons here are that it's embarrasing that I don't know Spanish and that I'm going to have to wait for Heather to come back before any of the neighborhood children try to pet the dogs again. They like her better.

Mathias Svalina said...

Thanks for clarifying the nature of the lesson.

A. Peterson said...

The lesson of this lesson is that I get sad when there are no comments.

A. Peterson said...

Any other perceived or received lessons are incorrect, and you should feel awful about it.

Mathias Svalina said...

"Will do."

julee said...

This post was super funny!

Once I was a TA for a human-computer interaction camp and summer class for college students. We had a chineese girl who went to SUNY Bighampton named Fang. I used to ask her what the words for "crazy" and "stalker" and "evil" were in chineese. I would work on them, and then surprise her with them and an evil/bugged out eyes/crossed eyes look on my face. She was super superstitious, so it always freaked her out.