MY WORD! – False Cognates and Other Slips of the Second-Language Tongue

Some 20 years ago, back when I was still trying to boost my Spanish from beginner’s level to intermediate, I got a priceless lesson on what are called false cognates—words that sound like they’d mean the same thing in different languages…but, sometimes tragically, don’t.

I was attending a big wedding reception in La Trinidad, a tiny village just outside of Puebla, Mexico. Sitting at the dining room table in the home of the bride’s parents, along with other members of the family, I needed a break and asked where to find the baño. Following the directions upstairs, I found myself in a small foyer surrounded by several rooms, each separated from the hall by a thick curtain.

For no particular reason I picked door number two and swept open the curtain. The young woman sitting on the toilet five feet in front of me scrambled to cover herself with a handful of toilet paper, but the damage was done. Backing gingerly away, I blurted some form of “Oops!” and waited nervously across the hall.

When she emerged, I clasped both hands to my heart and said earnestly: ¡Estoy tan embarasado! She seemed to accept my apology graciously, which must have been hard for her, since—as I later found out—I'd just managed to forget about one of the most notorious English-to-Spanish false cognates, and exclaimed “I’m so very pregnant!”

You can bet I learned the real word for “embarrassed,” (It’s avergonzado) and it has stayed learned. There are quite a few other potential slip-ups in Spanish; let’s hope I’ve learned them the easy way.

TURNABOUT IS FAIR PLAY
I recently asked my dear friend and one-time Spanish teacher, Silverio, who moved from Mexico City to Minneapolis about 25 years ago speaking very little English, what some of his most memorable gaffes have been. He recalled many, but these two stand out:

Having dinner with some co-workers, Silverio noticed that the guy across from him had a bit of French fry stuck just above his right eyebrow. Since the Spanish word for that part of one’s face—frente—wasn’t going to work with these all-American boys, he wracked his brain for the right term in English.

Let’s see…fore-…something or other. Oh yeah, got it. Pointing at the spot on his own face, Silverio shouted across the table, “Hey Larry, you’ve got something on your foreskin.”

Silverio, like me with my “pregnancy,” learned that vocabulary word the hard way. (And he’s still avergonzado to this day.)

One day at work he was on the phone with an important prospective customer. When the woman asked him how many people would be assigned to her account, Silverio knew he’d have to discuss the matter with his boss. But his nascent grasp of English word order turned his intended promise into a threat:
“I’ll get you back.”


THE PINEAPPLE OF POLITENESS
I can’t address false cognates without thinking of their cousins, malapropisms.* Malapropisms are words—in your own, first language—that don’t quite sound the same as the word you’re grasping for, but are close enough to be funny—and might even slip by unnoticed. Unlike false cognates, there’s no translation involved; you just blurt out the wrong word. Like this classic, from Mrs Malaprop herself: “He is the very pineapple of politeness!” Or this one from Aunt Sally in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: “I was most putrified with astonishment.”

What are some of your—or others’—funniest or most mortifying slips of the tongue? We’d love to hear from you!

* The term “malapropism” comes from a character called Mrs. Malaprop, from The Rivals, a 1775 five-act comedy by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Mrs. Malaprop did, in fact, use words incorrectly as a funny quirk of her character. Her name became the default term for misusing a word. Her name, in turn, comes from the French mal à propos, or “inappropriate.”

LANGUAGE QUIRKS – When a Few Words Are a Scream

For one who appreciates nuance, language is a storehouse of little quirks and wonders unto itself. Here are just a few that, since I first noticed them, have continued to fascinate—and occasionally irk—me.

Sometime in the last couple of decades—I'm not sure exactly when, but it seemed to have happened in a matter of just a year or two—the customary greeting one received from a counter person (at a bank or a fast food restaurant, for example) morphed from "Hi, may/can I help you?" or the somewhat more curt "Who's next?" to a lazy hybrid of the two: "Can I help who's next?"

It's not so much that the expression changed that fascinates me, but how it changed. Now I'm no etymologist, but I'm guessing it went viral within a few days of its use by a character on a sitcom. It caught on, and its curious appeal has continued to spread—even to people who should know better.

Here's another quirk that, once you first notice it, you'll seldom make it through a day without hearing. I suspect this one owes its existence to more than just the rapid spread of popular culture; it's just too subtle. It must be something about how our minds work. Consider these two sentences:

       "The problem is that she never got the information in the first place."

       "The problem is is that she never got the information in the first place."

What's the difference? You will almost never hear the first sentence. For some odd reason most people—and I mean almost everyone—will say "is" twice in any sentence of that construction. See if you can train your ear to catch it.

     "Everyone was grabbing for the 
       best deals. It was a real land mine!"

Then there are those hilarious, unintended manglings of common expressions. For years I've been fascinated with malapropisms, the inadvertent, usually humorous, substitution of words which sound like other words—like "He loves to dance the flamingo." (for flamenco).  I've taken a slightly different tack, fixating on how often speakers manage to blend two or more common descriptive phrases. I call them Mixed Monikers. Here are just a few of the many I've heard and jotted down over the years:

In trying to describe how little he trusted something one of his co-workers had said, I think this guy came up with an effective marriage of "flew in the face of reality" and "face the facts":

      "When I heard that, it just flew in the facts of what everyone else knows."

A radio talk show caller, trying to express the urgency of the need to pass a piece of legislation, unwittingly combined "like nobody's business" with "like there's no tomorrow" to produce:

      "They ought to be working like nobody's tomorrow!"

Supermodel and Bravo's Project Runway host, Heidi Klum, describing an occasion in which she was at a frantic loss for words, may have unwittingly merged "gasping for air" with "grasping at straws" when she said:

      "...I was gasping for the right word."

NPR reporter Jack Speer, in describing an especially critical ruling of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court (in the Delphi case), entertained me with this spontaneous intersection between "landmark" and "watershed":

      "It was a watermark decision."

And finally, one of my very favorites:

My mother-in-law, excited to tell us about the deals she'd found at one of those bargain basement sales in which shoppers push and shove their way to bins of discounted items, apparently grafted "Land Rush" to "Gold Mine":

      "Everyone was grabbing for the best deals. It was a real land mine!"