Guat

It's time to take out your American Spanish glossary, that ongoing list of Spanish words mixed, blended and pureed by the American experience. Words on the list so far include marketa, troka and aplicación. The latest addition comes from Silvia Hernandez. You'll remember her from a previous post. She's originally from Cuernavaca, the city that's to Mexico City what San Diego is to L.A., a prettier, cleaner getaway town. She's cleaned houses for 20 years in the Yorba Linda area. I met her after she'd been evacuated from her modest home across the Santa Ana River in Anaheim Hills. While talking to her about what she was doing Saturday, the day the flames from the Freeway Complex fire began crawling over the hills near her home, she said of the morning, Fuimos a garagear. Guat??? She said she and her sister left early Saturday morning to do the rounds of the garage sales. Oh. A noun in the adopted language transformed into a verb in the native language. Beautiful, don't you think?

Repeat after me: Yo garageo. Tú garageas. El garagea. Nosotros garageamos. Ellos garagean. And for my buddies from Madrid, Barcelona and Ponferrada: Vosotros garageáis. Quick lesson about garages south of here; the only Latin Americans who go to yard sales are the ones who live in the U.S. There are plenty of garages between Calexico and Ushuaia, but Latin Americans don't open them up and start offering their wares. Maybe it's a class issue, no? Right on. Fun with verbs.

You can probably make a stronger case to the Real Academia Española to let Americanized verbs into Spanish over nouns. (Opinions? Anyone?) I like the words that involve people doing new things. As teenagers in Tijuana my cousin and I used to talk to no end about new things we'd see on either side of the border, Tripeaste en eso, güey? Trip out on that borderspeak. Borders seem to be much more fluid than the walls and checkpoints that denote their official limits.

So, it may be a long time until the Real Academia's dictionary includes garagear. Why not? Comment est-ce qu'on dit 'marketing' en anglais? Silvia Hernández will long remember that Saturday morning garageo and the ensuing escape from the wildfires. She didn't find any deals. But she came out of it alive and kicking and so did her language.

The photo associated with this post was taken by Flickr user satanslaundromat. It was used under Creative Commons license.