Pardon my spanglish ¡Porque because!
Si tu vieras lo que se formó in the cuban airport cuando vieron ese strap-on en el luggage, niña! that was lo mas grande, para morirse.
SPANGLISH IS an identity, a culture, a world. our immigrant tumbao.
by: Bill Santiago
1. Don´t try to get away with reducing Spanglish to just un bonche de crazy new bastard words. And dissing the habla as puro slang si really el colmo del descaro. Slang is a set of informal words and phrases, perteneciente a un subculture, incorporated into an existing language. Spanglisg es un fenómeno mucho más abarcador. Certainly Spanglish is a great generator of slang, but nothing gets lost in traslation like foreign slang, por lo tanto es normal adaptarlo as it is. Sometimes we know more tan one way to say something y podemos escoger la manera that best suits our needs. Maybe lo modificamos justo un chipito so that it matches its new surroundings.
2. Una amiga mía swears que she doesnt speak Spanglish supuestamente because she never uses palabras like parquear or troca, even though she can barely get through a sentence without constant switcheo between languages. “¿Que what?” Who me? Déjate de bromas because I would never speak Spanglish”, she sayas. La mujer está en total denial. Pero it´s understandable que ella no quiera face the truth, porque she´s a Spanish teacher.
3. Se me hace hilarious el hecho de que el Spanglish gets attacked tanto por los English fundamentalists como por los extremistas del español. Personally, I think of Spanglish as very pro-Spanish. I wage it as an act of resistencia against the assmilate-or-else- mentality. We are lo que hablamos. Indeed, what we speak formats our reality, mientras a la misma vez providing the means to articulate it. We Spanglishistas are often depicted as a bunch of degenerate incultos who resort to Spanglish sólo porque we don´t speak English or Spanish very well. OK, a veces that´s a little true, but it doesn´t explain my father, un abogado who spoke, read and wrote both Spanish and English with native fluency a un nivel muy profesional. And he went back and forth between the two, como le daba la gana. I happen to speak two languages and use them both. What´s so lazy-brained about that? I happen to have to legs, too, but nobody ever accuses me of being perezoso because I don´t hop around on just one!
4. Not only is Spanglish spoken across the socioeconomic spectrum by individuals of all educations levels, it doesn’t even matter de cual país your people come from. All roads lead to Spanglish. A lo largo de los siglos, languages all change drásticamente. Whatever language you speak today is really just una etapa pasajera in the evolution of that language. Your grandkids´grandkids´grandkids nietos wouldn’t understand a damn thing you were saying si pudieras hablarles, because the language habría cambiado tanto by then que no se reconocería.
5. Los enemigos del Spanglish cannot win. La suya es una lucha perdida de antemamano. You might be able to stop global warming, but Spanglish just isn´t going away así de fácil. Grammar Nazis and lexical fascists, take note: Languages change, they evolve. Sin esta dinámica de transformación, adaptación, experimentación y cambio, no existiría ni English, ni Spanish. We don’t have to surrender or apologize to the high priests of any language, especially those who like to chalk up Spanglish to pereza mental.
6. Debemos siempre tener presente que Spanglish may not be high falutin´, pero tiene una dignidad propia that we must defend con orgullo. Sprinke Spanglish wherever you go. Be creatice and incorrigible about it. Take a look at these ejemplos de lo que he escuchado here and there:
Seriously, me hicieron una brujería or something.
Huele a homeless.
Estoy PMSing algo brutal.
I want and iPhone ¿Cuánto te costó esa vaina?
Don´t set the alarm que mañana tengo el día off.
¿Cómo de full está la clase de spinning?
Siempre le gusta estar showing off.
His lame excuse was, “No te pude llamar porque mi teléfono se cayó en el toilet”.
And here are the Top10 Spanglish bumper stickers:
10. My mother´s car es una porquería también.
9. Honk si eres indocumentado.
8. I´d rather be hablando español.
7. Pendejo on board.
6. Amigos don´t let amigos eat Taco Bell.
5. Estamos there yet?
4. Aliens are from Mars. Yo soy de Michoacán.
3. Changó is my co-pilot.
2. Forget milk, dame más gasolina.
1. Yo ♥ Spanglish. Twice the vocabulary, half the grammar.
