New skill: House throwing

Compliments come in unexpected forms. I, for one, got one without expecting it. Apparently the compliment thrower didn’t intend to be so profuse in commenting on my strength.

Let me explain:

A while back we hired a local woman to do household chores which we hate, things like cleaning, straightening, washing and windows. She did a good job, and we hired her back several times. With the more frequent visits came familiarity.

Once, in a just-between-us-girls voice, she told my wife that “Art is always throwing the house.” What’s that? I can toss a football with the best of the 69-year-olds; my baseball-throwing acumen is pathetic, and, I throw a bowling ball, well, just like Obama.

These are objects designed to be thrown, but how does one throw a house? I thought about it and of course realized that Spanish is Julia’s first language, and there’s a slight bridge to cross from one language to another. I’ll get to the “thrown” house in a few graphs.

Some readers may recall my reactions to public signs that give the wrong message when the sign designers simply assume a verbatim translation will do the trick. Someone who operated a restaurant that’s long-since closed advertised “La hora de la contenta,” believing it stood for “happy hour.” Instead, it means something like “the hour of the contented female.”

I’m not immune to making faulty translations, and that’s why I’ve memorized the phone numbers of Sarah Harris, a former colleague, and Dorothy Maestas, my current sister, who often advise me. Both have taught languages in college.

Along the same lines, I photographed a chalkboard on a sidewalk restaurant menu in Copenhagen that contained the words “Go Away.” Now is that the proper way of welcoming customers? I learned from a Danish host that the words referred not to xenophobic restaurateurs but as a way of advertising take-out food. We buy it and then we go away.

Now, back to thrown objects.

The first time time I inferred a special linguistic touch to “throw” came when I returned test papers to my seventh-graders in a language arts class at Cuba High School in the 1960s.

As a teacher who’d written copious notes on the papers, I was surprised to have been asked by some students, “Can we throw them?” It seems that after checking the grade and ignoring the marginal comments, all they wished to do was hurl the papers.

Well, now, aside from my having personally invested 12 hours per page per student, I didn’t want a mess in the classroom. What did they intend to do with the thrown papers? First make paper airplanes? One student explained how they meant “throw,” but that didn’t make me feel better, discovering their obvious lack of interest in my graded comments, other than checking the letter grade.

Weren’t they the least bit interested in the several times I wrote “cliche” or “trite” in the margins, and other markings expected of English teachers? From that time on, I required them to keep all returned papers — at least until after we’d gone over them in class.

Almost all my students in Cuba were bilingual. It is clear that the Spanish verb “tirar” means “to throw.” But in Spanish, we generally lack the word that gives the expression precision, i.e., not just to throw the paper, but to throw it somewhere, preferably away.

One could say something like “tirarlo en la basura,” meaning to pitch the paper into the trash, but we usually don’t go that far and simply say “throw.”

My mother, fond of corralling all five of us children every Saturday morning and announcing that the house “esta todo tirado” obviously gave the mess message. She wasn’t exactly describing our house, on Railroad Avenue, as having a nice, cozy feel and look. But she never used the English equivalent, or at least never said the house was “thrown.”

Fittingly, Mom’s use of “tirado” comes close to — but should not be confused with — the etymology of “tirade,” a performance that often immediately followed “tirado.”

Julia’s reference to my house-throwing shows a slight variation of what my former students meant. The reason we hired the woman was to tidy up our messy house; I think it’s counter-productive, not to mention plain silly, for us to “unthrow” the house just before the cleaning lady arrives. Ever met someone who cleans the thrown house beforehand, lest the hired help think the hosts are sloppy?

I admit to occasionally placing objects on the floor and failing to pick them up, but to “throw” the house stretches things a bit. In Spanish, “tirar,” as in “throw” or “make messy” is common. In English, we clutter, but we don’t really throw houses.

Samson of the Bible is one of the few who qualify for the honor of throwing a house. And of course, a great actor like Lionel Barrymore or Sir Laurence Olivier might also claim to have “brought the house down.”