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Peter Edgerton
Malaga
Friday, 30 May 2025, 14:13
Well, it's a pound to a penny that the young, Spanish shop assistant had never heard that particular question before:
"Do you have a product that I could use to darken some furniture made of pineapple, please?"
She cocked her head delicately to one side, and offered a faintly furrowed brow in the manner of a labrador puppy who's just been told to 'fetch' in late nineteenth-century Esperanto. I'd realised my mistake instantly and attempted to backtrack sharpish in a vain attempt to salvage some dignity.
"Sorry, I meant to say a product for furniture made of pine wood."
To her eternal credit, she suppressed any urge to laugh out loud at my expense and smiled sympathetically, presumably believing me to be a foreigner making a valiant attempt at beginner's Spanish after only a few weeks in town, rather than somebody who's been speaking the language daily for more than a quarter of a century.
To be fair, saying 'piña' (pineapple) rather than 'pino' (pine wood) isn't the greatest faux-pas in the history of international communications but it has to be one of the funniest. I do hope she laughed out loud at my expense later in the pub with her friends. I certainly deserved it.
Sad to say these lapses are not uncommon. Although I'd like to think I could hold down a conversation in Spanish on a wide variety of subject matter with only a light smattering of errors, every so often I'll find myself dropping in a word which bears a vague resemblance to the one I want to say but means something entirely different.
One particularly memorable example involved me momentarily confusing 'caballo' (horse) and 'cabello' (hair). (This basic error was compounded by the fact that, even if I'd said "I like your hair" as intended and not "I like your horse", it still would have been pretty creepy the way I'd formulated it. "Tienes un pelo muy bonito" or using "peinado" (hairstyle) would have both been much more elegant options. Alas, unlike the horse, they eluded me.
Language proficiency is an odd, subjective thing. Some will judge it on the number of grammatical mistakes that a person makes, while others will put more stock in the appropriate use of a wide range of idioms and colloquialisms. The best speakers of a foreign language almost certainly find a happy equilibrium between these two complementary perspectives.
To tell the truth, I'm still not entirely sure where the random introduction of tropical fruits into general hardware store enquiries would fit into this finely-balanced equation, but I strongly suspect it wouldn't be in a good way.
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