Accent on the Asinine

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.)