It’s All in the Tilde

I had a little love affair with a word yesterday before I was jilted by a tilde.

After taking a few years off, I am once again taking Spanish lessons here in our winter city of Guanajuato, Mexico. It’s tricky for me to know what it is I need. On the one hand, I speak reasonably well in conversation, though I often stumble against vocabulary that should be—but never is—at the tip of my tongue. I have a good grasp of the structure of the language, grammar-geek that I am, but all that between-the-ears knowledge gets frozen on its way to my mouth. Me empaño. It makes me gloomy.

Vocabulary and practice, practice, practice. And even more practice, because, well…I don’t remember things as well as I used to. So I have a lovely young woman coming to my house twice a week to work on Spanish. I’m not sure she knows what to do with me either. 

For now, I’m now reading a lovely little book called Cajas de Carton—Cardboard Boxes by Francisco Jiménez, marking unfamiliar words as I go and checking their meaning second time through. There are an embarrassing number.

Spanish if full of reflexive verbs. You don’t just sit down; you sit yourself down. You get yourself up in the morning and get yourself dressed, and later you put yourself back to bed. And, it seems, when you feel gloomy that’s something you do to yourself too. Empañarse: to become gloomy. The root is empañar: to blur, to dull. It makes perfect sense. 

But for a few hours, I was wrapped in a hilarious mis-translation. Because there’s another word, one that I already know. Empanar: to roll (something) in breadcrumbs. Having neglected to take note of the tilde, I concluded that I’d discovered a wonderful linguistic metaphor. To become gloomy was to roll oneself in breadcrumbs. And wouldn’t that make one a bit gloomy? Especially since the next step would be to throw oneself into hot oil? Freírse, I suppose. To fry oneself. 

It all came crashing down when I explained my new finding to a far more fluent Spanish-speaker. Though he didn’t know empañarse, he did know the non-reflexive form, to dull or blur. I had to admit it was more likely. And of course someone had a cell phone handy. Within seconds, my error was confirmed. 

Embarrassing. I just wanted to roll myself in breadcrumbs.