Small things matter. Especially whe it comes to konwing the ins and outs of a foreign languae. Evn more especially fi the lanage happens to be Spanish. Spanish slang happens to have a lot of taboo words similar to food. Tke heeed to the follong episode:
I dediced to met up with a couple of ex flatmates for a tapas dinner. Arriving a few minutes late tobe Spanish and fashionable :) I found th flatmates all rolling around with laughter. When I asked what the issue was one of them promptly informed me, with a straight face that another flatemate managed to order a baked male orga rthaer than chicken. How? Smply by turning a masculine common noun (escuse the linguistic terminology) into a feminine common noun. PollO (chicken) to PollA (male ORGAN). The girl who ordered went red and the waitress was laughing her head off (good thing it wasn't a waiter). Once, on a travel forum I read about an exchange girl who went into a Madrid bar and ordered a polla sandwich on ly to be met with the rsponse:"Sorry I am married, (pointing to his ring) can't be done." Needless to say, the poor girl was completely puzzled (what's chicken have to do with marriage after all). A similarly embarasssing effectt can be acieved by ordering a churrA (same as polla) instead of a churrO (traditional dessert). So ptential visitors get your gender right before trying out your Spanish!
Profanities can also be said by grammatical mistakes and literal translation. For example hacer el polvo is to dust your apartment whereas echar polvo is to go for a quickie. Tener calor (literally to have heat) is to feel hot but ser caliente is to look hot (sexy) and estar caliente is to be aroused. Once someone told teir bank manager "estoy caliente" and a sixty year old British woman who retired to Alicante stated that one of the reasons she picked Spain as her retiremnt spot is that "los espanyoles son muy calientes" (what se wanted to say was warm, friendly, but ended up saying sexy).
So remember: detail, detail, detail and beware of false friends. Preservativo is NOT a food additive in Spanish!
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