Bad Habits (Spanglish 101, Class #1)

Learning to laugh at myself was a big part of my time in Peru...and it continues!  Language errors can be embarrassing, even harmful, but most of all they are forgivable, and often hysterical!  I thought I'd share a few of the funny ones here on my blog.

Last week in class, we learned how to describe when someone picks up a habit.  I had to come up with a sentence in Spanish and then translate it into English.  "Mi hermano le ha dado por fumar," was fine (and not actually true), but when I tried to translate it into English, I made everyone laugh.  Fumar is "smoking" in Spanish and my brain couldn't quite jump to English entirely.  So I somehow kept a half-Spanish accent on the last word and said, "My brother started 'fooming'."  If I had pronounced it "fyuming" I could have said, all in proper English, "My brother started fuming," but that would have meant something different entirely.

The verb "fumar" always makes me smile because of a story my friends tell about one of the former SIL Peru directors.  Police often stop foreigners in Peru and sometimes it's hard to get out of the situation without losing a little cash.  But in order for the transaction to occur, the foreigner has to at least speak a little Spanish.  My friend used that last bit to to his advantage when he was stopped by a cop (for doing nothing wrong).  When the cop asked him to roll down the window and started to question him, my friend (who is fluent in Spanish) looked up at him quizzically and said, "Uh...no...uh...no fumar español."  No, my friend didn't smoke Spanish. :)  The cop just waived him away.