My First Essay on Pragmatics

While I've been home, one of the questions I've been getting the most from people is if Manuel and I ever experience any sort of language barrier. I answer that, generally speaking, no, we do not, and explain that Manuel grew up going to a bilingual school -- he even learned his colors in English before Spanish, for some reason.

But more than that, I think it's true, as Manuel himself once suggested, that when you live with someone for a while or are around them all the time, you end up establishing your own (inter)personal mini-language (regardless of whether or not you share the same native tongue), the components of which would not necessarily make automatic sense to the untrained ear, but which are unambiguous -- crystal clear -- to those in-the-know.

For a close group of friends of mine in college, our mini-language involved referring to objects by their colors. If I wanted Rina to hand me the blue blanket off the back of the couch, for instance, I might say, "Hey Rins, will you pass me the blue?" Someone unfamiliar with this way of speaking might respond with a, "Huh? The blue what?" but Rina would know exactly what I meant, just as I would know that if Sophie and I were making omelettes and she were to say, "I need the yellowish orange," I should scan the vicinity for the nearest yellowish orange object and then give her the bag of shredded cheddar cheese.

And so it is with Manuel and me. We've developed our own way of communicating, our own mini-language. For example, sometimes I make nouns into verbs, and he has gotten used to this. Now, it should be noted that, while among native English speakers, I've noticed, this practice is not all that uncommon (and even if I said "water me" or "beer me" to someone who didn't themself -- it should be a word, it really, really shoud -- say things like this, it would more or less make sense given the context), in Spanish (apparently), people just don't talk like that.

Nonetheless, when I ask Manuel, "me aguas?" or, "me cervezas?" he will pass me the water or beer without hesitating, albeit also without being quiet -- he will usually protest my bastardizing of his language by shouting, "Don't say that!" or, "La puta que te partio!" (roughly translated, "the whore who gave birth to you!")

Another aspect of our mini-language has to do with vocabulary. Despite Manuel's near-flawless English, his vocabulary is not without its holes -- for a long time, he didn't know the word "oven" and there are certain vegetables, like carrots and lettuce, that he either doesn't know or just doesn't bother to come up with mid-sentence. And so a lot of our conversations include sentences like this: "Baby, will you turn on the horno for the meat? I'm going to cut up the zanahorias and put them in the lechuga with the tomatoes."

For the most part, we get by just fine like this -- conversations primarily in English with Spanish words thrown in from here to there. Still, there are times when things do get lost in translation and communication does temporarily break down. For example, one night not too long ago, we had just finished a late (though not so late by Argentine standards) dinner and Manuel said that he was going to make some black tea, and did I want him to make me some, as well? I said no thank you, that I was going to go to bed soon and didn't want to have anything with caffeine in it.

To which he responded, "No, I asked if you wanted some tea."

"No, I don't want anything with caffeine in it," I said, not sure why I was having to repeat myself.

"No, no, no," he came back with. "I said, 'Do you want some TEA?'"

At this point, I began to suspect that something was amiss, but, like the toddler who foolishly reaches for the hot stove a second time, not expecting to get burned, I repeated yet again, more slowly and louder (because sometimes it seems like just raising the volume is enough to get your point across), "I. DON'T. WANT. CAFFEINE."

"But tea doesn't have caffeine in it," he said.

"Black tea sure as hell does," I said and thought, have you been living under a rock your whole life?

"No it doesn't," he said. "It has te-eine."

"What the fuck is te-eine?"

"Coffee has cafeina, and tea has teina." And this is how I learned that in Spanish there's a different word for the caffeine in coffee and the caffeine in tea.

"Well, not in English, it doesn't," I said.

In the end, it was relieving to know that it was just Argentina where my boyfriend had been living his whole life, not under a rock, but, as I confirmed with you, Candy, when I went to visit you in Princeton, regardless of the language in which you are speaking, the substances in question in coffee and tea are molecularly identical, so it's not a good idea to drink either one of them right before you go to bed.

In other words, what's in a name? That which we call caffeine by any other name would keep you up all night.