Buying meat here means going to the meat counter and asking for what you want. Yeah, so, that means you have to talk. A few weeks ago I went up to the meat counter (with a little fear and trembling) and asked for a half kilo of lingua. The meat man just smiled knowingly and asked me if I wanted a half kilo of linguiça. “yes,” I quickly affirmed, “I want a half kilo of linguiça. (that would be sausage) I don’t want any lingua (that would be tongue). Thank you.”
Then, last week, I made some cookies and took a plate of them over to the apartment of three single girl students. They weren’t home, so Cali, Karina, and I left the cookies on the counter in their kitchen. Then we walked to the vegetable market. And at the vegetable market, we met the girls we had been looking for. So I told one of them, Tamara, who loves to laugh, that I left something sweet on her bocão for her to try. She looked completely baffled, so I slowed down and repeated myself, thinking about each word to make sure that I had the verb conjugation right and that everything agreed in gender and quantity. “I. left. something. sweet. on. your.” She still seemed to be tracking, until I said the last word again, “bocão“. And then she just stared at me, wide-eyed and confused. Finally she said, “you know that a bocão is a big mouth, right?”
“Oh no!” But of course. Boca is mouth, and if you want to make anything bigger you can put the -ão ending on it. Yes, so I had been telling her that I left something sweet in her big mouth.
“No, no” I hastened to describe her kitchen and the big flat spot next to the sink where you can put stuff, and then the light went on in her eyes.
“oh, you mean my balcão!” she laughed.
Yes, that’s what I meant. And now I will never forget that word again. It was the joke for the rest of the week. Every time I saw her I asked if she had enjoyed what I had left in her big mouth, and she always burst out laughing again. When I told her that I had accidentally asked the meat counter man for a half kilo of lingua, she laughed even harder.
“You do know that some people really do eat tongue, don’t you?”
“yeah, I know,” I said, “do you?”
She shook her head emphatically, with those big wide eyes punctuating her “no.” Apparently its not the typical, everyday Brazilian cuisine.
Well, learning a language can be humbling, but it can be a lot of fun laughing at yourself, too.
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