Mucho Ado About Nada

I just read an article in the Washington Post about a 16-year-old, Zach Rubio, who was suspended from a high school in Kansas City for speaking Spanish. According to Zach: "It was, like, totally not in the classroom. We were in the, like, hall or whatever, on restroom break. This kid I know, he's like, 'Me prestas un dolar?' ['Will you lend me a dollar?'] Well, he asked in Spanish; it just seemed natural to answer that way. So I'm like, 'No problema.' " The principal, Jennifer Watts, defended her suspension of Zach by saying, "This is not the first time we have [asked]Zach and others to not speak Spanish at school."

Well. I'll come back to the language problems of both the young man -- and his principal. But first I hearken back to the summer of 1967 when a cousin and I were on an outing to San Francisco and she heard two adult women speaking Spanish. She said, "What the hell's wrong with them people? Why don't they learn to speak English like the rest of us?"

I thought the same thing then as I do now: Dotty doesn't know Spanish. And neither do I. I feel guilty that I don't know Spanish. If Spanish-speaking immigrants can become bilingual, why can't we Anglos? I don't know what "them people" are saying.

The shortcoming is mine, not theirs. I did well enough in school, especially in English and Latin. Alas -- don't see many people in togas I can strike up a conversation with; and doing well in English has just frustrated me because I listen to somebody in these parts murder the language virtually every day. (In most cases it's not because "he don't know no better." Hillspeak is a badge of honor, an assertion of pride in being plain folk, of not puttin' on the dog, an in-your-face part of the cultural war as fought by the likes of the lady who sings "Redneck Woman." In her case, highly profitably.)

As for German, I did fairly in it in college, and -- this is the truth -- once worked briefly with a Japanese whose English was so poor that I could barely understand him, but when he found out I'd studied German we conversed passably in it. I really struggled with it then because my grammar, vocabulary, and noun and pronoun declensions were abominable, but we talked a little.

Why not learn Spanish? I once heard a blue-collar Chicano with a drinking problem in Utah say to a group, "Why are you people so offended when we speak Spanish to each other? Why is it so much trouble for you to learn Spanish? Hell, I learned English in jail!"

And Zach, like, learned his English from, like, his peers, and although it leaves something to be, like, desired, he is honest-to-God bilingual. And I envy the hell out of him. (The principal, by the way, split an infinitive, but that's pretty small cerveza by today's standards of the standard English of presumably educated people.) (An infinitive? What the hell's that?)

I grew up in southern rural Indiana, and while I was doing so, there wasn't much Spanish spoken here. Now there is quite a lot. I hear it about every time I go to Wal-Mart. I wish I knew what they were saying. I wish I'd taken Spanish in high school instead of Latin and Spanish in college instead of German. I decided after all my Marco Polo wanderings and adventures to settle in little old Forlorn River, Indiana, and I can't understand the speech of the Chicanos who live here. Ai! Chihuahua!