{"id":1117,"date":"2013-03-10T21:16:14","date_gmt":"2013-03-11T02:16:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/jevon-rich\/?p=1117"},"modified":"2013-03-10T21:16:14","modified_gmt":"2013-03-11T02:16:14","slug":"language-blunders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/jevon-rich\/2013\/03\/10\/language-blunders\/","title":{"rendered":"Language Blunders"},"content":{"rendered":"

Buying meat here means going to the meat counter and asking for what you want.\u00a0 Yeah, so, that means you have to talk<\/strong><\/span>.\u00a0 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<\/em>.\u00a0 The meat man just smiled knowingly and asked me if I wanted a half kilo of lingui\u00e7a<\/em>.\u00a0 “yes,” I quickly affirmed, “I want a half kilo of lingui\u00e7a<\/em>.\u00a0 (that would be sausage)\u00a0 I don’t want any lingua<\/em> (that would be tongue).\u00a0 Thank you.”<\/p>\n

Then, last week, I made some cookies and took a plate of them over to the apartment of three single girl students.\u00a0 They weren’t home, so Cali, Karina, and I left the cookies on the counter in their kitchen.\u00a0 Then we walked to the vegetable market.\u00a0 And at the vegetable market, we met the girls we had been looking for.\u00a0 So I told one of them, Tamara, who loves to laugh, that I left something sweet on her boc\u00e3o<\/em> for her to try.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 “I.\u00a0 left.\u00a0 something.\u00a0 sweet.\u00a0 on.\u00a0 your.”\u00a0 She still seemed to be tracking, until I said the last word again, “boc\u00e3o<\/em>“.\u00a0 And then she just stared at me, wide-eyed and confused.\u00a0 Finally she said, “you know that a boc\u00e3o<\/em> is a big mouth, right?”<\/p>\n

“Oh no!”\u00a0 But of course.\u00a0\u00a0Boca<\/em> is mouth, and if you want to make anything bigger you can put the -\u00e3o<\/em> ending on it.\u00a0 Yes, so I had been telling her that I left something sweet in her big mouth.<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n

“oh, you mean my bal<\/strong>c\u00e3o<\/em>!”\u00a0 she laughed.<\/p>\n

Yes, that’s what I meant.\u00a0 And now I will never forget that word again.\u00a0 It was the joke for the rest of the week.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 When I told her that I had accidentally asked the meat counter man for a half kilo of lingua<\/em>, she laughed even harder.<\/p>\n

“You do know that some people really do eat tongue, don’t you?”<\/p>\n

“yeah, I know,” I said, “do you?”<\/p>\n

She shook her head emphatically, with those big wide eyes punctuating her “no.”\u00a0 Apparently its not the typical, everyday Brazilian cuisine.<\/p>\n

Well, learning a language can be humbling, but it can be a lot of fun laughing at yourself, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Buying meat here means going to the meat counter and asking for what you want.\u00a0 Yeah, so, that means you have to talk.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The meat man just smiled knowingly and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":552,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1117","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-training","7":"entry"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/jevon-rich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/jevon-rich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/jevon-rich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/jevon-rich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/552"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/jevon-rich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/jevon-rich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1117\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/jevon-rich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/jevon-rich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/jevon-rich\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}