A native English speaker who’s been studying Spanish for 11 years with her husband finds that learning a second language has an effect on her original tongue. She can’t spell as well as she used to, and sometimes finds herself reaching for Spanish...
You might assume that the Welsh word plant means the same thing it does in English, but this word is a linguistic false friend. The Welsh word plentyn means “child,” and the word plant means “children.” Some false friends are etymologically...
The Mexican Spanish term tules means “bulrushes” or “marsh plants.” In parts of California and along the Pacific coast, toolies or tulies refers to a place that’s in a remote area, or in other words, out in the sticks. This is part of a complete...
Rosa recalls that when she was growing up in Karnes City, Texas, in the 1960s, she and other Mexican-American children were segregated into a separate classroom and forbidden to speak Spanish at school. Her teachers also replaced her first name...
Summer reading recommendations! Martha loves A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, a beautifully illustrated anthology of letters from well-known writers and others celebrating reading. The book is edited by Maria Popovic of Brainpickings...
Margaret from Denton, Texas, says that during her many years in northern New Mexico she noticed that residents with Latino roots often used the phrase landed up instead of ended up, and get down off the car rather than get out of the car. The latter...
