My intention was not to wish
recipients of our annual holiday letter a “happy new anus.”
Although I hope it would
go without saying, if you know me at all, that I always, every year, wish even my worst enemies
(well, most of them, anyway) a complete absence of anal discord—whether the
area is intact since birth or is new thanks to reconstruction after some tragic mishap. Anal happiness is
the kind of thing that isn’t top of mind unless and until there’s a failure down
there. But I don’t take mine or anyone else’s for granted. Let me be clear.
Still, I tend not to reference
excrement-producing body parts in the opening line of our holiday greeting.
(Although I certainly reserve the right to do so thereafter, should it serve my
comedic purpose.) What I meant to do,
rather, was to wish letter recipients a happy new year, in Spanish, exactly as singer Jose Feliciano had done in his
1970 Christmas-season hit Feliz Navidad—a
Feliciano-penned song in which the anus is mentioned not once, in any language.
The one-page letter’s
unifying theme was the fact that Lynn, in 2015, took up the study of Spanish,
in egregious violation of the unstated but nevertheless time-honored mutual
non-ambition pact we’d entered into when we married way back in 1992. (For further
reference, see the July 2015 post titled “Tongue-Tied.”)
Along the way to sharing with
holiday letter readers some of the “highlights,” such as they were, of our “year
that was,” I described my disappointment that Lynn not only unilaterally embarked
on a self-improvement project as ambitious as learning a second language—ripping to figurative shreds the mental and emotional (if not physical)
life contract we’d all but signed in blood when we linked our lazy-assed non-fortunes
together during the waning days of the George HW Bush administration—but that
she thereafter rubbed salt in the wound by tirelessly studying and consistently applying
herself to the pursuit. So, where I might have forgiven the transgression had
it been half-hearted and quickly abandoned—as, indeed, had been our joint
effort (if you want to call it that) to learn Spanish years ago in an adult education
class under a crazy Cuban woman who
blessedly was such a bad teacher that we happily gave up just a few weeks in—Lynn’s
renewed determination to habla espanol
under her yoga-class friend, Gabriela from Uruguay, seemed absurdly ambitious
and almost punitive toward her TV-watching, couch-drooling spouse.
So—appropriately, I thought—I
used our holiday letter as a way to air my grievances, in a nod to Festivus, yes, but, also in the way that the
leader of a sovereign country might reference outrageous treaty violations in a
year-end address to his or her people on the national highs and lows of the
preceding 12 months. To quickly establish my theme, I opened the letter in Spanish
with the salutation, per the song title, Feliz
Navidad! (Merry Christmas!) Continuing
the Feliciano-esque message, the letter’s
first line was, “And prospero ano y
felicidad, while we’re at it, although Eric had to look up the spelling of
that phrase just now.” That indeed had been the case, as my proficiency in
Spanish is nada. I therefore consulted
a couple of different websites to ensure that I’d spelled every word correctly.
(If you think I typed even the words habla
espanol above without consulting the Internet, you are mistaken.)
So, I was quite surprised recently,
when a friend and long-ago coworker of mine mocked me good-naturedly about
having wished her, her husband and her two sons a “happy new anus” in 2016, while
expressing surprise that a man who writes and edits for a living had made such
a vulgarly comical blunder. Marlene’s family is from Bolivia, and she grew up
speaking Spanish. She took smirking pleasure in informing me that, while I’d spelled
the Spanish word for “year” correctly in the letter's opening line—a-n-o—by failing to place the squiggly-line
accent mark called a tilde over the “n,” I’d inadvertently written not the
Spanish word for “year” but the Spanish word for “anus.”
To quote the similarly
monolingual English-speaker Homer Simpson, “D’oh!”
Had I even noticed that tilde when I’d looked up
the phrase’s spelling? Maybe. Or maybe not. If I had, I no doubt asked myself, “What
difference could it possibly make?” It’s long been a peeve of mine that
non-English languages seem to stick all manner of vexing and seemingly
superfluous accent marks over random letters, in what surely—much like the designation
of masculine and feminine identities to words regardless of any apparent rhyme or
reason—serve no purpose other than to stick it to English-only speakers like me
who are perfectly content to play the role of global-village idiot. Why dignify
such nose-thumbing with additional research, to see if the tilde’s absence could have any consequences?
Also, I might observe, if the
tilde is so freaking important, in an age in which America fast is becoming a
majority-minority country, why isn’t it even included on contemporary computer
keyboards?
Oops. As it turns out, “D’oh!”
again.
Actually, the tilde is there, I discovered that literally as I was typing this post. It’s in the upper left-hand corner, just below the escape
key. But I guess it’s kind of like how I
never see the condiment container in the refrigerator, sitting on a shelf directly
in front of me, until my exasperated wife reaches around me and grabs it.
I never noticed the tilde key
until I just a few moments ago Googled the search term “insert tilde in Microsoft Word.” I’d
previously thought it might be included in the weird symbols under “Insert” on
Word, perhaps abutting the sign for the British pound. In fact, I’d looked
there after the conversation with Marlene, but, for the life of pi (which was there), I couldn’t find it.
So, I read the instructions
off the Internet for how to insert the tilde over a letter. They were, “Hold control and shift keys. Press the tilde
key. Press the letter “n.”
The “tilde key?” I thought. Where the hell is there a tilde key?! That’s
when I took a closer look at the keyboard—and found it in approximately three
seconds, “hiding” right there in plain sight.
So, I followed the
instructions. And, what do you know? “Anus” quickly transforms into “year.” Ano to año. Similarly, one can
change espanol to español; I realized that I got that
wrong above, too.
(I didn’t check, though, to
see if “espanol,” without the tilde, turns the English word for “Spanish” into
something inadvertently vulgar, such as the Spanish word for “erection.” I sort
of don’t want to know what transgression I may have committed several
paragraphs ago.)
As Marlene laughed at my
mistake a couple of weeks ago, I defended myself as best I could, noting, “I am a good editor in English. In Spanish?
Not so much.”
At least I won’t make
the same mistake in any future holiday letter. I already made an anus of myself
once. That was suficiente. ("Enough." No tilde.)
