It’s always been fun to play with the language. Rather than being a drudge, English can be fascinating. It is to me.

Let me explain: Several years ago, I served on a committee charged with the hiring of the editor for La Mecha, Highlands’ weekly newspaper. One of the applicants was Eva, an Austrian-born woman who spoke English, Spanish, German and French. She’d been my student in several journalism courses, and naturally, I recommended her. I told the group that Eva was a polyglot.

Well, that drew umbrage from one of the student members, a man just a few years younger than I. He used a line straight from Thumper in the 1942 movie, “Bambi” — “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” Continue reading →

The first installment of Work of Art, on May 1, 2003, declared that talk certainly is not cheap. In that column I mentioned paying more than $52, to listen to a woman, who spoke flawless Spanish, tell me my close relative had been detenida at a hotel in Tijuana.

The name the caller gave was Maria Trujillo, which fits both my mom and my sister. The catch is that my mother had died six months earlier and my sister had gotten married months earlier. I listened to the collect call I had agreed to pay for, but after a few minutes I said to myself, “Self, you’ve been had.”

The caller hadn’t even gotten to the important and time-consuming part: the part where she was to give me a couple of numbers to call to secure the safe release of Maria Trujillo. I didn’t wait for the woman to repeat the numbers. I hung up, and soon thereafter, bundled with my Qwest bill, was a Zero Plus charge of $13 a minute for four minutes.

Would I have had to mortgage my house and family if I had stuck around to hear those two numbers I was to call? And if I had called them, would I still be in debt? Strange how it was a common con, but it took me minutes to realize it. Continue reading →

With 2010 coming up, we wonder what changes we can expect. And if there are changes, which ones and to what extent?

People don’t feel too concerned over the nice, even round number that 2010 will represent, nothing like when nature’s odometer turned from 1999 to 2000, or Year Two Thousand.

Ten years ago my wife and I were attending a Y2K party at the home of Prentiss and Nancy Childs, when we got a phone call requesting we go to my mother’s house on Railroad Avenue. My two older sisters, Dolores and Dorothy, had arrived from California to spend Christmas and New Year’s Day with Mom, but a few ticks before the year 2000, Mom insisted she needed “a man around the house.”

We left the party for Mom’s house, where she revealed the fear that everything electrical would suddenly melt down. But the main issue for her was whether she should make “cafecito” before midnight, just to have it handy. Continue reading →

Invention is the mother of necessity. Just because if it’s been manufactured, we must have one. A look at the spending frenzy Sunday night at Santa Fe’s Best Buy convinced me that the world is ending tomorrow, and if people don’t buy their gadgets immediately, there’s no hope.

For the most part, I’m a practitioner of shopping at home, but what I needed was not available locally. As I saw people grabbing up flat-screen TVs, for less than $200, I wondered why the serious jolt to the economy doesn’t seem to have hit Santa Fe or Las Vegas.

Remember when TVs resembled goldfish bowls? They bulged out and were more round than square. The cheapest, smallest color TV set went for $350, back 30 years ago, when that amount was much dearer to us. With each upgrade of a computer, TV, iPod or cell phone, somehow we must have the latest version. Continue reading →

Possibly due to strict upbringing, or maybe because of a year with Sister Immer Richtig at Immaculate Conception School, I’m accustomed to saying, and, especially, hearing, “That’s wrong.”

Teachers are discouraged from using the “w” word, lest somebody’s ego gets crushed and Mommy and Daddy need to run interference for the brutalized child.

Let me explain:

In what may seem like a concession on my part, on the part of the most persnickety Language Cop alive, I’m coming around to accepting the fact that language changes and — dare I admit it? — language is what people make of it, not necessarily what dictionaries say it is or should be. Continue reading →

Andy Rooney’s segment on “60 Minutes” Sunday evening made a point that’s become increasingly obvious: Few people write letters the way they used to.

Rooney drew the patent conclusion that with e-mail almost instantaneous and almost free, the Postal Service receives less revenue because fewer people mail that way.

Of the 40-plus names on my e-mail address book, I know the street address of precious few of them. What about their phone numbers? That’s even worse. Having cordless and cell phones that store 50 numbers, we don’t actually “dial” people anymore.

The matter became increasingly apparent this week when I received calls from different recipients in different states who wondered whether my once-sharp spelling and grammar skills had taken a nosedive.

Let me explain: Continue reading →

With trembling hands, I slid my thumb under the perforated seal in anticipation of news that could be only good or bad.

The envelope had the image of the bald eagle, a line of stars and the word “official” two places in front and once in back. It came with the familiar no-nonsense san-serif font we’re all familiar with, and it bore specific instructions:

• “To be opened by addressee only.” Darn! I was hoping my neighbor James Sandoval would be the first to open it.
• “Postmaster: Follow official postal rules.” Really? Don’t postmasters sometimes take home official-looking envelopes with the idea of making paper airplanes?
• “Do not discard this envelope.” Oooh! Shivers down my spine. I’ll be enjoying decades of accommodation at Leavenworth if I pitch this envelope. Maybe I can join my uncle who grew old there after removing one of those silly tags from a “Silly” mattress (I mean “Sealy,” but that’s a topic for a later column.)
• “Official U.S. mail recipient.” Well, now, that makes me feel all warm and runny inside. For too many years I’ve doubted my officialness. Now I have something to be proud of. Remember those bumper stickers, blazoned with red, white and blue stars and stripes that read “Official U.S. Taxpayer”? Continue reading →

It took years for turkey to become palatable for me, especially in light of memories of witnessing turkey slaughters in Buena Vista, a little settlement near Mora.

Although my older siblings insist our visits to the home of Uncle Margarito Lucero were brief and sporadic, I still recall clearly an exposure to matters more agrarian than my city-slicker being should know about. And these memories appear to span several summers.

We’d visit the small farm in the summer, enjoy navigating the ditch, picking apples in the orchard and eating fresh-picked peas. We got our first bareback ride on a tired gelding named Paul. Once, on a trip to the post office, a half mile from the Lucero homestead, we noticed how Paul moped along while carrying us away from the fertile farmland and how he picked up the pace on the way back.

That gave us an idea: If Paul is walking faster on the way home, let’s speed him up even more, just like in the movies. Accordingly, my older brother, Severino, dug his heels, Gene Autry-style, into Paul’s sides, and in seconds, Paul transformed into Mine That Bird, the recent Kentucky Derby winner. Obviously, we got transferred to the ground, and Paul wouldn’t let us near him for the rest of the day.

Thanksgiving turkey, for an 8-year-old boy, was something the folks bought at Safeway, not something that’s beheaded on a tree stump, Pilgrim style. Continue reading →

There’s little more flattering than receiving a letter, call or e-mail from a reader in a “gotcha” moment. “I caught a typo in your last column. You were supposed to have spelled it ‘proofreader,’ not ‘poofreader.’”

Well, yes, the first spelling is what you’ll find in the dictionary. The second — done for effect, honest — usually appears in this column.

I once read a list of disclaimers for aging, one that when people reach my age, they’ve earned the right to be eccentric, as in “nobody should argue with me for that’s the way I do things.” In addition, many attribute to us extreme forgetfulness. Just look at most of the senior-based jokes and cartoons in the popular media.

But I’m not pleading any of these. It’s a cop-out to blame our eccentricities on age. Haven’t we seen some of the same quirks that afflict the elderly manifested in the young? How many students one-third my age have used the excuse, “I forgot to bring my term paper”?

As an unrepentant language cop, I chase words and commas. I’ve written entire columns on single words, and this column might shape up to be one of those. Continue reading →

My dad, who lived almost 95 years and who passed away in 1998, might have believed that he and his own father invented the Spanish language. The few times I watched him become passionate about an issue often dealt with the language he so loved, usually a lament about the deterioration and especially adulteration of Spanish.

Let me explain:

J.D. Trujillo once quoted his father, Severino Trujillo, as having said, “If I knew English as well as I know Spanish, I’d be difficult to get along with.” I pondered that bit of braggadocio: Is that what it comes down to? Does that mean the goal in acquiring languages is to reduce one’s circle of friends? Polyglots then earn the right to become hermits?

Any abuse of Spanish caused my father to enter his sardonic mode and quote imaginary abusers by saying something like, “Wachate, ese” (“watch yourself,” as Zeus said to Narcissus), or “Tengo un typewriter, vato,” instead of the seven-syllable maquina de escribir.

As a youngster, I’d ask him how anyone could prevent the proliferation of Spanglish, whereby we simply put a Spanish-type ending on an English word for a new coinage. For example, a dime would become “un daime,” a quarter a “cuatta.” A penny? Don’t go there. Continue reading →