linguistic snot knots
i know i've explored this theme in great detail here in my ds journal, but i was not able to find them and i need to vent.
i told off a mexican imperialist at swim lessons tonight. he was with a child approximately the same age as baby sis (3) and the parental small talk started friendly enough. children have that unifying way about them. the fellow was new to swim lessons and looking for reassurance that his daughter was okay for her current fear of her swim instructor. our 3 have been in swim lessons for long enough to be well adapted.
the problem arose when he turned his heavy mexican accent to bragging about his language skills with such smug superiority that i found myself bracing for the "los gringos no se pueden" routine. your accent gets uglier every time i'm forced to listen that routine, bubba. learning that i studied biology in ecuador didn't interest him in the slightest. his linguistic pride hadn't reached queen isabel's court yet. i walked away. i returned and he was off again as soon as i returned. i cut loose on him in spanish about the injustice of his pride. don't make me listen to your inflated ego when i am not even permitted to speak. of course he answered my spanish commentary in english with his foreign accent growing thicker and uglier each time he answered my spanish in english. that is saying allot since his accent started out thicker than the mexico city smog.
when i returned again, his linguistic pride was on how skillfully he was teaching his child to speak spanish. i didn't ask if she was afraid of her teacher because she doesn't understand english. instead, i began to speak in spanish, with him answering in english, about the difficulties children have in growing up listening to this linguistic prejudice. the child's eyes lit merrily to hear me speaking spanish with enthusiastic overtures of joining the conversation. daddy said good-bye in english while he picked up the confused child and ran. si, mi hija (mija in mexico) se pueden.
vent, vent, gnarl gnash. . .
si, se puede. no crees los racistas.
Replies
Hola Arfie,
Racism feels like a punch in the heart, I’m sorry you had to deal with that
I’m glad you kept speaking Spanish :)
That guy sounds like he had some machismo too
Pinches racistas
Big hugs <3
thank you, missy. your support --in english-- is priceless. me alucina mucho quanto este appoyo se cambian por el cambio de idioma.
a little weird which seems to be developing in the border states is that folks who speak a dialect other than mexican are as heavily criticized as gringos for not speaking "properly." mexicans are not the most benevolent majority ever created. minority spanish speakers --including gringos-- are banding together more and more in defense of their imperialism. si, se puede y se debe.
yup, serious machismo con modales de un chivo. he is an mexican imperialist, after all. his current bride is younger than the daughters of previous marriages. we are impressed, but not in the mexican tradition.
Yea that stuff is bonkers
this morning finds me still ranting at last night's mexican imperialist. half in spanish, half in english. the english half of the rant is centered on the theme of "how dare you call **MY** accent ugly and unacceptable! ! ! like the french accents i once admired, spanish accents get uglier with every righteous insult and insistent language change.
plying therapy tools. . . reminding myself that i barely know this man. one culturally standardized spiel is not enough to fuel the 12 hours of intrusive thoughts which followed his anxious flight from the gringa loca.
breathing. . . reminding myself to keep ^it^ real.
for sure, the psycho snot knot attached to human languages is HUGE for me, starting with the speech defect which held me mute until early adolescence. my stutter can still be bullied to the top by such encounters in any and all of my languages. many days i still believe human is my second language. well. . . if i count nature languages, humanese isnae even close to my second language.
the piece of this episode my quiet voice seems to be latching on to is speaking spanish, no matter how long these language bigots keep answering me in their hideous english. it is kind of fun to remember how his already thick accent got thicker each time he answered my spanish in english.
sorting. . . processing. . .
i have wished more than once that i could forget the language i amnae permitted to speak. asserting my right TO speak could be the healthier alternative. maybe. . . small bytes and long chews.
my subliminal arguments with the mexican imperialist continue. they are, quite specifically, targeted at mexican imperialists. here so near the mexican border, non-mexican spanish speakers suffer as much discrimination in spanish as non-morenos suffer in english. a citizen of east mexico city can expect attacks on their "ugly* accents from the citizens of west mexico city. i am currently experiencing flashbacks to the castillian (non-moren0) professor in ecuador who stood "un mono" from the ecuadorian coast in front of the trigonometry class to ridicule is coastal accent. after watching in stunned silence, i took extra care to keep my gringo accent out of his sensitive castillian ears. "el mono" dropped out of the university that very day.
no nintendo nuthin. . .
while plying compassionate mindfulness to the intrusive thoughts, i note that the psychosis is calmer when i rant in spanish, starting with the declaration that part of asserting my right to speak whatever language i damn well choose saves me from having to listen to ugly hispanic accents in english. quid pro quo. su accento extranjero no es mas bonito que mio, chivo. debemos ser iguales in tolerancia, ?no?
an interesting thing happened as i worked through my morning meditations. one of my support websites is a military sisterhood which is more covidic exposure therapy than support. these gals are world leaders in covidic compliance. methinks the collective is reluctant to give up the mandated display of patriotic compliance. this morning there was a post complaining about the side effects of their latest covid booster shot while applauding their own show of patriotic compliance. the responses to the post continued the theme. go ladies. salute that red, white and blue, but please keep your laws off my freedom.
curious ripples spread from the covidic drop into the pools of mexican imperialism. . .
?que sucedio por aca?
sorting. . .
i suspect divine intervention on this twist of the linguistic snot knot. one of my egg customers carries the aura of a genuinely lost soul. there is chemistry between us and we have been flirting with friendship for a goodly while now. the flirtation has been mostly textual. she is a tele-nurse and as busy as any med pro i have watched from a safe social distance. my medical distancing habits caused me to push her away when i discovered her profession, but her lost air and her fledgling efforts at homesteading kept calling my attention to her.
over the course of this slow relationship growth i was mildly surprised to discover that she is an immigrant from stuttgart, germany. her accent was solidly american and offered no clue, but that is not uncommon among our recent german immigrants. when a german loses something, it stays lost. 100% of the recent german immigrants i have known both here and in south america have managed to lose every trace of their native accents in both spanish and english. their take on being called, "gringo" is quite diverse and colorful, most especially among the "gringos" who studied spanish instead of english. no hablo ingles, amigo.
i still consider german my second language, even though i have yet to achieve fluency in the spoken language. the germans are even worse than the spanish in their linguistic prudery. over the 2 1/2 years i lived in germany, i was not allowed to speak the language, though they demanded the right to practice their heavily accented english on me with the telling of euro anti-yankee jokes. my german blood meant nothing to them. i was a yankee and nothing but a yankee. some of them preferred to call me, "capitalist pig." girl, howdy, the percussive german accent can put some serious venom into that affectionate nickname.
i miss my language studies. i have looked into resuming my mandarin studies, but my little ship of fools has yet to stabilize enough for confidence in pursuing those options. over the manicky course of getting to know this woman, one day i impulsively asked her if she still spoke german. her eyes phased out of focus at the question and it took her a while to form the single syllable response of, "yes." before she fluttered on her busy way. the subject died there. business as usual.
yesterday the impulse arose again and i texted her that i was experiencing an urge to pull out my old german books. her answer was that she needed eggs and had a break in her busy schedule. she would be here in about 20 minutes. during our brief real time encounter she told me she would be delighted to speak german with me. she almost never has the opportunity to speak her native language here.
i dug up those books this morning. Es könnte heilend sein, mein Deutsch zu üben.
i believe more and more in my theories that foreign language helps untangle my psycho snot knots by forging new neural pathways. spanish no longer qualifies in this regard. as with my native english, my spanish will not ever pass muster in an imperial court, but i have been fluent for long enough to have an already massive neural network in spanish. Deutsch ist noch qualifiziert. Ich habe es nie geschafft, fließend Deutsch zu sprechen. Seine neuralen Bahnen bleiben unentwickelt.
the healing mysteries strike again?
a dominant slime coughing all over my linguistic snot knots begins in the mid 60's on one of the abandoned farms my parents lived on. the dream was of a familiar, unseen presence cradling me in perfect comfort as we moved backward through time. the dream ended with a tour of the construction site for the tower of babble. the construction site tour ended beneath a storage table in a seedy tavern in the labor housing division of the job site. beneath the table was a young girl, filthy, malnourished and terrified to tears.
the dream ended with the unseen presence booming through one of the cecil b. demille sunsets, "you are to be my translator."
i woke from the dream obsessed with languages. guesses have been hazarded that this was the trigger for my dramatic academic rise from "retarded" to "gifted." proof unavailable. if so, i was still mostly mute at the time of the dream. it took me an unknowable number of years to master english, but i visited the modest foreign language sections of the public libraries often. formal language classes became available to me in the freshman year of high school. the math on that is simple. I.F. my data is correct, that would have been 1968. i started with french. of course i wasnae able to finish the class. there was a different language class in each of the five high schools i needed to drop out of 10th grade. twice.
fa has family coming today. her english is not quite advanced enough for her to honor the language changing tradition, but she is close. i've had plenty of folks with english less advanced than hers tell me they are my superior. her family's english is more than equal to the task and they perform the task with practiced efficiency. like all the rest of the folks i have asked about why they do that, they were surprised to learn they were doing so. methinks i will try to get deliberate with the technique which popped out compulsively with the mexican imperialist and answer them in spanish. i am curious to see if their spanish accents will intensify with my refusal to change language with them as it did with the imperialist.
my great inhibitor with this thought is the children. to the fullest of my gentle testing, their daughter does not speak spanish, either. i do not know how well she understands it because her parents have always been present to prevent me from speaking spanish.
an important note is that fa and her family are beloved by everyone on our little ship of fools. none of us want to risk losing their friendship.
i am in yet another phase of wishing i could get the hateful spanish language out of my head. what a tangled can of worms it is to understand a language i amnae welcome to speak or understand. what was i thinking when i committed the hard work of learning this cursed language? i knew i was the wrong color when i started. why was i stupid enough to cross that great divide? i've been reviewing german in hopes of drowning out the spanish. it isn't working so far.
long before i made the mistake of learning spanish, i was well saturated on the spanish speaker cliche that "i hate it when THEY practice spanish on me." the cliche is especially ugly spoken in beginner's english. one side practices, no matter how long they have been speaking the language. the other side gains instant mastery with never a need to practice. then we get to defining "THEY." given the color of my own skin, i believe it is safe to assume THEY are gringos. good thing only gringos can be racist, huh?
for a bit over a year, we have been flirting with a family whose parents are from the dominican republic. our children are the common ground which bring us within flirting distance. their daughter is the same age as big bro and they like each other quite allot. the son is low functioning autistic and speaks the languages i recall from my mute years. he responds far better to spanish than english. i don't believe he hears my gringo accent. spanish is spanish.
both families are interested in raising our children bilingual. it isnae going well for either family. the daughter is starting to openly rebel against the family attempts to get her to speak spanish. being the wrong color to speak (i can only practice) spanish, i do not attempt to treat the dreams of raising my gk's bilingual and spanish is only one of the foreign languages we play with. for me, it will be enough to avoid the all-american (canada to argentina) language phobia.
the mother of this family is tolerant --in a heavy dominican accent-- of my "practicing" my spanish on her. the father refuses --with his heavy u.s. barrio accent-- to speak the language with me. gee, fellas, what are our children rebelling against?
somebody explain this to me, please.
I think it’s cool you speak Spanish. I like when people speak Spanish to me, but I have complexes about how I speak both English & Spanish... when I’m around people that can only speak English I start thinking in my head “oh man you can’t speak English for shit compared to these people (vocabulary & stuff, I look up a lot of words people post in English.. sometimes I knew it & should’ve been more sure & other times I just beat myself for not having as good a vocabulary) .... then Spanish I speak like a crazy Boricua Nuyorican & feel high pressure when I’ve been in Puerto Rico to speak it perfect....
I’ve also had been lectured in the past how important it is to speak Spanish
then & also have been lectured about speaking English well
So sometimes in my head I think that if I honestly don’t think I speak either one good enough to I just not speak human well? I can speak cat, dog, trees, horse ect. so .... if you made it this far :) I’m not really sure what I’m saying here was going to erase because I’m literally just rambling on about my complexes in your journal
But then I thought wow listen to the complex I have (is that the word complex? I don’t know if I saying it rite) but you know complex like my issues. I bet those other guys it’s all their issues not yours
Or maybe you just don’t live around enough Puerto Rican’s hehe :) just kiddin
Either way I think you speak English & Spanish very well (probably both better than me)
& yea I think it’s their issues & theres probably a lot of people out there (like me) that think it’s nice that you can speak both
Big hugs <3
*pps the other night when I was loosin my mind with the stuff I have going on & it was nice when you wrote the serenity prayer in Spanish in that post, it helped me take a breath in the state of mind I was in
(((((Abrazos))))) <3
now i gotta know, how are you finding my add-on posts? i didn't know there was a way to be notified of them. you are the only one who has managed to find a single one of my journal add-ons. how do you do it?
thank you, thank you, thank you for rambling about your complexes in my journal. language is designed to be shared and i don't for a minute believe that i can untangle these linguistic snot knots by talking to myself, whatever the language.
i write much better than i speak any of my human languages, missy. that early speech defect made it so that i learned how to write long before i could manage speech. the speech therapy which helped me learn how to speak is where i acquired both my language and music passions. to my logic, music is my first language since i was taught how to sing what i needed to say and then to modulate my tones to imitate speech. i still stutter to silence under duress but i can always sing.
i still haven't crossed this cultural divide with any of the many u.s. hispanic folks i know well enough to make the attempt with. every time i try, i hit a ? ? ? wall? phobia? cultural secrecy code? dunno what to call ^it^, but your confusion sounds like it could contain much of the ^it^ which confuses them to silence. my spider senses always tell me to back off and leave it be.
my dil was a language phobic mexican. her family carries on more hispanic traditions than most of the citizens of mexico, but only the father speaks spanish. his wife and all 7 of his children are so language phobic that they hesitate to order tacos for fear of the spanish language. daddy was a tyrannical language teacher. his wife could speak spanish when they married, but he beat that right out of her. he taught irrational fear (phobia) far better than he taught grammar. she is far from the only person i have heard this story from. i knew my dil before my son did and she is far from the only high school student who has asked me to tutor them in spanish.
don't accuse me of experting, but those same obscure spider senses feel a connection between these older students and the reactions i see in the young children whose parents refuse to speak spanish with me. just a spider sense. . .
for what it's worth
spiders keep all 8 of their feet on different strands of their web so that they can feel even the slightest turbulence in their web. somehow they always know the difference between a juicy but they run to wrap and a weird wild woman jiggling their web with a feather. those spider senses are a deeply profound mystery.
another fwiw
i still think you are a good candidate for linguistic psychotherapy. Willst du mit mir Deutsch lernen?
another fwiw
i lifted the german from the google machine translator.
Hi Arfie
sorry I meant to write this back a couple days ago but I had some really tough days that were ... I don’t have the words.
Anyways this came up in my notifications the other day when you wrote in the journal, I got a notification that said ‘arfie commented on a journal’ well actually 2 & when I clicked on one it went to a comment you wrote on my journal & when I clicked the other one it took me to this journal
The only word in German I know is sheise because one of my friends that I used to bartender with back in the day used to say it whenever he made a mistake or would drop something lol
I hope your doing well as I’m writing this or having a good day
Big hug <3
makes sense on how you find my stray entries. . . notifications drive me nuttier, so i turned mine down to the minimum at the same time i set up my profile. i suspect i will be embarrassed to note how many years ago that was.
have you played with the machine translators any? type english german or vice versa into your web browser and a variety of machine translators will come up where you can type in what you want to say or translate and . . . bingo . . . all of a sudden you're a little smarter. you can't learn the entire language that way, but it's a dandy toy and/or study aid.
i like portuguese, too, even though my portuguese teacher kept slapping my desk to tell me to drop the spanish accent.
brincar com idiomas pode ser muito divertido
eu me reservo o direito de jogar com qualquer idioma
is it paranoia when i imagine i am talking to ?at? someone who is analyzing my accent more than they are listening to the attempted conversation? it is a common enough encounter when i speak spanish that i donae believe so. i have long since lost count of how many times i have encountered this look and later encountered that same person gringo bashing with deep conviction. los gringos no se pueden. for certain it has happened often enough that i believe i know the look. no sense to continuing the conversation. i am only giving them more slings and arrows for their next anti-gringo rant. los conquistidores ya estan sobre-armados en este asunto.
the farm assistant's (fa) 20-something year old daughter is visiting from italy where she lives with her italian husband of 2 years. yesterday was only the second time i have spoken with her in fa's 3+ years on the farm. as with her teenaged brother, she wore that very look while i attempted to get to know her. i see her brother far more often and am still seeing this very look at every attempted conversation i always feel like a squashed bug after these attempts. no puedo ser mas que una gringa generica.
dunno. . . just wondering. . .
for certain i knew this look well long before i had the confidence to attempt speaking languages other than english among english speakers who, likewise, cannot understand foreign accents. in english, we call ^it^ racism and u.s. minorities claim it is easy to tell when they are speaking to a racist. i never gave it much credibility because these are the same folks who assure me only crackers, gringos, yankees, infidels, goyim, gaijin, etc., etc., can be racist. whatever you say, my righteous one.
grammar is the art of using the words to discredit the message.