¿Es el papa una papa?

[underpants]

[tblue37]

1. El papa is the pope. La papa is potato.

[underpants]

2. Oh

It doesn’t say that.

I’ll just be over here

[tblue37]

3. When my former husband and I used to herd a study-abroad group in Spain, the students

would go into the stores and ask for "los papas fritos"--wanting potato chips, but asking for fried popes.

[underpants]

4. 😆

[TlalocW]

7. One of my degrees is Spanish

One of my favorite professors talked about when he was learning, on his first trip to Mexico, he ordered a "Siete-Arriba" in a restaurant and got confused stares from the waitstaff.

Recently I was talking with a Colombian friend over video chat, and I wanted to tell her about some beekeeping classes I had been taking. So I was talking about the honey and having to wear the suit so as not to get stung, but in the beginning I was struggling with what the word for bee was, and I thought it might be related Latin-language-wise to apiarist and ape is Italian for bee, so I used "apio." She was very concerned about the kind of celery raised in America that requires you to wear a suit and use smoke to calm it down.

TlalocW

[tblue37]

8. One of the female students in one of our groups asked at a bar for a "cono de cerveza,"

and when her error was explained said in dismay, Estoy tan embarazada! "

(The tilde in coño doesn't show in the subject line, because such marks aren't accepted in the subject line at DU.)

[Leith]

10. I don't know what

coño means, but I hope her baby was happy and healthy.

Never mind. I just googled it. Oops!

[tblue37]

11. Yeah--oops. The word she needed was "cana," with a tilde over the " n":

una caña de cerveza.

The word she said is Spanish for the "c"-word that we never use on DU.

[tblue37]

9. BTW, the same young woman asked our highly educated and elegant guide one morning at

breakfast, "Julian, como están tus juevos?"

[TlalocW]

12. One of my favorite Spanish jokes

Is about a man getting on a bus and going to sit down next to a woman who yells, "Cuidado! Los huevos!" The man looks at the seat and sees a brown paper bag and apologizes for almost sitting on her lunch. And the woman says, "Lunch? What do you mean lunch?" as she takes out two large needles and yarn and begins to knit.

TlalocW

[tblue37]

13. LOL!

[LakeArenal]

5. One of them actually has an accent to make it a different word.

Lots of words in Spanish are not capitalized.

[abqtommy]

6. Don't apologize, underpants. In Ensenada, Mexico, the tavern chain named PAPAS is

known for serving french fries and beer. And yesterday I learned that I've been using the
greeting "Ola Mijo" when writing email to my oldest son. But "Ola" is Portugese while
"Mijo" is Spanish used as an affectionate term to address a male child. The correct
Spanish usage is "Hola Mijo" but I was multilingual and didn't even know it!