Spachinglish (spah ching lish)

Balderdash anyone? Well for those of you out there – I decided to invent a new word but I’m guessing all y’all with fancy multi-lingual abilities (and talkin’ Texan doesn’t count) already understand the concept. I’m still in multi-lingual infancy stage – but it is an important first step I suppose.

After working at World Link (now World Link GlenEagles International Medical & Dental Centers) for 2 months, I finally had an opportunity to potentially use my Spanish speaking skills since one of the MDs mentioned that she had a couple from Mexico that will be delivering this fall. I realized that since they are over in Shanghai, their English is probably pretty good, and so I was a little insecure about trying it out … that, and I didn’t want to cause another international incident and insult them (like I did with the Germans) or make an ass out of myself – my grammar is bad enough in English – you don’t want to hear the Spanish version. But just the fact I was meeting with them, I thought I would try and dust off the cobwebs of what Spanglish I could remember and quickly realized the language center of my brain is a jumbled mess. It reminded me of a funny incident when I was back in the Austin in March when I had a run-in with the nice Hispanic cleaning lady at the hotel and I was trying to tell her yes, I’m checking out and that she could clean my room – I managed to fumble out Dui (Chinese for Yes), then Oui (not sure where the French came from) then finally Si – as I was figuring out how to say the rest of the sentence, she took pitty on me and said… “I understand” – in English. Yeah – it’s pretty bad when the rest of the World has one-upped us on their language abilities.

Adding in a third language has been an especially interesting challenge. Trying to come up with complete sentences where all the words are in the same language is more difficult than one might imagine. So I thought maybe creating a new language altogether called Spachinglish would be the best thing for me to do and WOW am I good at it. Too bad my pioneering efforts have not been rewarded – except with blank stares by helpless cab drivers. So I guess I will abandon that idea for now because it was a bitch trying to figure out an alphabet.