“Let’s go over that again, Phillip, and this time, try to get rid of the excessive tire pressure.”

That was part of a bit of coaching I once did as a teacher of beginning speech in high school and college. My 33 years of teaching that subject yielded some interesting trivia.

First, I learned that students in this area have peculiar speech mannerisms. How many times have you heard it said that people in Las Vegas specifically, and northern New Mexico generally, have their own style of talking?

Let me explain:

Spanish speakers in particular often parade a whole new vocabulary, even though we know the correct word for what we’re saying. For example, “¿Ya estuvo?” which is a way of asking another if the person has finished a certain task, suddenly becomes ¿Ya estufas?”

And that, my friends, is a permutation that means something like “stoves, already?” I didn’t promise you these liberties with the language were going to make sense.

Fellow columnist Lupita Gonzales once floored me by taking extreme liberties with her response to a simple question. I had emailed her a question about grammar, and her reply was (hold your breath!) “¿Porqueria quieres saber?” (Why do you want to know?”) Now most people understand that, depending on its position in the sentence, “¿porque?” means “why?” and without the question marks, it’s “because.”

But Lupita, who’s spent a lifetime parsing words in Latin, French, Spanish, German, English, etc., and in fixing punctuation, wrote “¿porqueria?” which means “a sloppy mess.” That word only sounds like “¿porque?”

In spite of my fascination with how people in this area communicate, I’ve never tackled this particular issue, so, understandably, the following paragraphs will probably have more question marks than periods.

Is the “estufas” and “porqueria” phenomenon a bit of slang, a method of speaking in a way different from others? Wasn’t slang created as possibly the only means of communication aimed at confusing others? By this I mean that youngsters often conjure up a host of terms they hope their parents won’t understand.

I believe the use of slang also confers on its users a kind of membership, or a secret code, password or sign known only to the “in” crowd.

When in the classroom, my students quickly learned what I called forbidden words: “ya know,” “I dunno,” “I mean,” “like” and “well.” Soon I needed to add another word, the tire pressure construction mentioned above.

Ya know, sometimes we get so wrapped up in simply counting a speaker’s use of “ya know” that we fail even to listen to the message. “Ya know,” for all its endearing qualities, seems to have been replaced by “like,” as in “Like, I was like going to town and I like saw my friend, who was all like all kinds of dressed up, and I’m so like ‘wow’!”

But let’s get back to Señor Air Pressure. Phillip had a way of beginning many sentences with “psshh.” It sounds like air escaping from a tire. Now, “psshh” ought not be confused with “psst,” a sound made when we want a person’s attention.

After much “psshh-ing,” I discussed it with some colleagues, one of whom made the explanation obvious. She asked, “Don’t you remember when you were a kid, and Sister Misa Mayor confronted you, accused you, demanded an explanation and didn’t really give you time to respond?”

Yes, as a matter of fact, that seemed to be my daily regimen: being confronted and accused. Then it hit me: Psshh is a shortening of “Pues,” which every Las Vegas kid knows is how we begin any sentence in our attempts to explain things to a nun.

“Pues” is roughly equivalent to the English “well,” but “pues” represents a whole lot more. “Pues” is the first word in a feeble denial, as in “Pues, Sister, I was just looking at the statue and all of a sudden it fell all by itself. Pues that’s the truth, Sister.”

The teachers at Immaculate Conception, where I went to school, didn’t seem to think we needed time to explain our misdeeds, and because of the rush, we’d shorten “pues” to “psshh.”

In fairness to Phillip, he was only one of legions of psshh-ers; it’s simply that we hadn’t been aware of the air-filled exhalation until then. Soon after, scores of students who delivered speeches included psshh at least once.

Pues, what’s the moral of this story? Pues, I’ve been out of the classroom for more than a decade and thus unable to zero in on students’ speech. But an event a week ago brought it all back to me.

Pues you see, during the run of “Over the Edge V,” Lisa Cisneros did some rapid costume changes and needed to tape on a skinny black mustache, don some cholo clothes and play the part of Paco.

During that segment, Lisa began virtually every sentence with “psshh.” What vivid memories she brought back! It was so convincing that one would think she’d been rehearsing — or perhaps even living — that role all her life.

So pervasive is psshh-ing that if you listen carefully, you’ll hear many instances of psshh, and not all in the classroom. Oh, but I forgot to mention: Psshh appears to be the exclusive domain of male Hispanics. No woman, and certainly no non-Hispanic, has ever uttered that sound.

Pues it’s something that must be wired into our DNA. But yo no se porqueria it’s that way.

And don’t ask, “Pues, if only men use that word, how come Lisa Cisneros psshh-ed?” Well, there’s an exception when it’s a woman playing the part of a male in a Las Vegas theater performance.

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