Juan Won One
Brown People and White Words
There is always at least one word that’s a bugaboo for my people either because it’s difficult to pronounce, understand, or just plain feels awkward in the triangulation between our eyes, our brains, and our tongues. I have to concentrate with a hefty dose of Zen mindfulness when reading the words hearth, omniscient, and posthumously out loud especially in front of white people. My former roommate could not, for the life of her, correctly repeat linoleum. For years my father was saying Tex-Mex-ing instead of texting. And my cousin remembers being teased by white peers because he pronounced the word won like the name Juan.
What would otherwise be ordinary verbal hiccups on the part English-speaking mainstream have often been used to stereotype Latinx people as inarticulate and unintelligent despite the fact that everybody, from practiced new anchors to immigrant kindergarteners, makes such errors.
At the same time, a dialect like Chicano English does produce its own idiosyncratic vocabularies and pronunciations that may seem unintelligible, or even wrong, to outsiders. We utilize an ethnic vernacular that can mix Spanish into our English while also making up entirely new words and phrases. I was on a jury trial with a diverse selection of LA peoples when a Chicana postal woman told us a story during a court break that involved sunflower seeds. In her telling she referred to them as Polly seeds. I, of course, knew immediately what she was talking about. Everyone else— the Japanese college administrator, the gay Jewish lawyer, the older white stewardess —looked confused. What the hell are Polly seeds? they wondered. They’re sunflowers seeds, you know, as in the ‘Polly-wants-a-cracker’ seeds that parrots feed on? I had no clue as to the etymology or history of that phrase, but I became hyper-conscious of the Chicana postal worker’s word choice once she used it. In my mind, I was like, Gurl, that’s our word, don’t be using it in front of other people!
Years later, I was happily astounded to see author Michael Jaime-Becerra use Polly seeds in his short story collection Every Night is Ladies Night. He was doing the Chicano wordsmith-ing Shakespeare did for Early Modern English— working the vernacular into a literature validating our idiosyncratic doing of language.
Splurging
A gaggle of us Latinx teachers were in the faculty lounge, lounging, when a Latino substitute approached our group. As he joined us, he immediately asked, in a furtive tone, what does splurge mean?
He had come across that word in a second-grade lesson he was teaching, but was stumped because he had never heard the word before. He was confused about its meaning. I’m thinking the word sounded a little too risqué, similar to when I first heard the word spelunking. He felt safe enough, however, to ask us, as colleagues, what it meant. “To indulge in something,” we told him. We offered sentences as examples; the same way we would have done with the children inside our classrooms. He understood and promptly left back to his assignment.
I maybe might have too quickly judged his intelligence, I’m ashamed to admit. I mean, who doesn’t know what splurge means? It’s not exactly pulchritude or eleemosynary. But then I remembered that once during a professional development I didn’t know the word tam. The word is so short and easy to read that I was embarrassed to discover I didn’t know all the three-letter words of the English language. Mr. B______, a fellow kindergarten teacher who wore such a large variety of hats to work that another teacher once suggested he might be an undercover spy, knew that tam is short for tam o’ shanter, a Scottish woolen cap. Of course, he did. He probably owned at least three different tams. Mr. B_______ promptly schooled me by letting me know what tam meant, and later he also taught me the word gabardine (he was a clotheshorse, not a spy). I admit I might have been embarrassed both as a professional educator and holder of a B.A. in American literature by not knowing this three-lettered word.
But being amongst other Latinx educators can lessen the sting of vocabulary embarrassment. As an ethnic group we often have more than one language swishing (swirling?, sloshing?) around in our minds and many of us grew up speaking an odd yet original mix of both languages, altering our sense of which language is which. I’m a native English speaker and growing up I would’ve insisted to the death that the words ombligo, lagañas, and la hielera were plain ol’ American English. My parents flawlessly inserted them into the mostly-English sentences they used when speaking with us children.
The substitute’s word lapse with splurge made me curious because, although I didn’t ask him, I suspected he deliberately choose a browner shade of teachers for his one-word emergency vocabulary lesson. Asking any other group would be risking professional ridicule. Teachers, of all races and ethnicities, can be pedantic know-it-alls when faced with a peer who reveals a lapse in their content knowledge. I’ve heard, and been, the teacher who snickers when a colleague doesn’t know a piece of ordinary trivia or mishandles a word. The truth is teachers are the ultimate nerd Mean Girls. Oh my God, she doesn’t know the difference between a diphthong and a consonant digraph?! What swap meet did she buy her credential at?
The Way Crows Fly
White colleagues often throw out words, phrases, and idioms that, when I was younger, I pretended to understand, careful not to reveal myself as less educated or less American than my interlocutors. But as I grew in confidence, I started to deliberately ask them what they meant whenever they bandied about unrecognizable bits of English. I asked them to account for the peculiarities and regionality of their language not only so I could learn from them, but also so they could understand they were speaking a particular vernacular not always shared by those around them. When a colleague offering me directions threw out an “as the crow flies,” I stopped and asked her to explain herself. “What’s this about a crow?” I asked. It turns out to be an old-fashion idiom meaning “in a straight line.” She had grown up in South Dakota and it showed.
A similar thing happened to the drag queen of Dominican descent, Kandy Muse, during an episode of the reality spin-off show Untucked. When the other drag queens tell her that she is “turning over a new leaf” she is confused by the literal meaning of the saying. When they explain that it means starting over, becoming something different and better than what you were before, she then says un-ironically, “If you have a leaf and turn it, it’s the same leaf.”
The drag queens laugh knowing she has a point.
I dated a young Mexican guy who was undocumented but had been schooled in the United States from about 3rd grade. He spoke English, completely and clearly. I took him to a birthday dinner of a good friend. We sat next to my friend’s work colleague who was an older professional white woman. She was voluble and gregarious. At one point she leaned over to my boyfriend and asked, “And so what keeps you honest?” My boyfriend looked like a Latinx deer stuck in English-beaming headlights. Then he began looking back and forth between me and the woman, nervously laughing, basically miming, What the fuck is this lady talking about? Help me. He was confused, and maybe even subconsciously assuming she was somehow obliquely referring to his legal status. I interrupted and translated for him, “She’s asking what you do for work. What do you do for a living?” The conversation moved on, but it reminded me of the many times I’ve witnessed miscommunications between white people and my family or my students or myself, for that matter, where they presume the universality of their metaphors and idioms and expect us to silently make up the cultural difference.
Chimneys
As a teacher I once glanced over at an elementary level standardized test and saw that one of the questions asked the kids how many syllables were in the word chimney. I answered to myself, three, of course. Chi-meh-ney. I was wrong. I was in my thirties. I have an English degree from UCLA and Masters in Professional Writing from USC. I am credentialed by the state of California to teach language arts to young children. I’m both a professional teacher and writer. The correct answer is that there are TWO syllables in chimney. Chim-ney.
Daaaamn. Should I resign? I thought
My Chicano language insecurity rose. My mouth went dry. I wondered, where had I mis-learned that chimney had three syllables? How’d I mix that one up? What was the origin story of my mispronunciation? Then I recalled Dick Van Dyke in the movie Mary Poppins. The film was a childhood favorite of mine where Van Dyke played a chimney sweep and sang the famous: “Chim Chim-in-ey, Chim Chim-in-ey, Chim Chim Cher-ee. A sweep is as lucky as lucky can be…” Dude used THREE syllables when singing those lyrics! I felt seen…or heard, rather, once I confirmed this on Disney’s Sing-Along YouTube channel.
The problem was that not only was the iconic actor forcibly fitting the word into the melody of the song by adding an extra syllable, but he was doing so with an apparently horrendous rendition of a Cockney accent. Somehow a little boy from East LA had transformed into a reverse Eliza Doolittle by watching Disney films. To this day, I insist chimney sounds better vocalized with three syllables as opposed to two.
Revolt of the Cockroach People
You can hear many Latinx do the same syllable addition with the word cockroach.
Many Latinos will add an extra syllable. We often say cock-a-roach or caca-roach instead of the standard cock-roach. If you look up comic Freddie Prinze doing a standup bit about roaches on the May 21, 1974 episode of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, you can hear him adding this extra syllable, “Cock-a-roaches. In my building we have Puerto Rican ones. They threaten me before I go out.”
Pahrump pum phwsh.
Maybe this mispronunciation is our way of marrying the 2-syllable cockroach and the 4-syllable cucaracha. Our syncretic version is a 3-syllable ca-ca-roach. Some would judge this addition as unintelligent and plainly wrong, but it’s just a tomayto, tomahto preference.
The problem comes when these linguistic distinctions, rooted in culture and ethnicity, are not accounted for in standardized tests purporting to measure intelligence and knowledge. Latinos’ particular ways of doing language are often challenged and undermined as embarrassingly incorrect. But everyone has their particular way of doing language from Bostonians who ravage r-controlled vowels to those who speak in a Caribbean patois and won’t place their teeth on their tongues to produce the /th/ sound. Do these variations necessarily have to be academically or socially disqualifying?
Without protesting too much though, I think our mispronunciations, our wrong answers on tests, say more about the uselessness of standardized tests than our own supposed linguistic deficits. There are holes, or shall I say variances, in everybody’s language, but my suspicion is that Latinx people might be suffering additional deducted points in a world always keeping a score and policing status. Maybe we say burly instead of barely and prolly instead of probably, but that doesn’t mean that the magnificence of our lives or intellect is any less than those speaking the King’s English, or whoever substitutes for the King in America.
Our deletions, insertions, and general stutterings are not necessarily reflective of what we know. What might be deemed the poverty of our speech might just be reflecting the splendor of our heritages (to augment a famous Emerson quote about life being our dictionary).
The predicament for teachers is what educator and proponent of unschooling John Holt noted, “We should also remember that children (like adults), and above all young children, know and understand much more than they can put into words.”