The question of the day is how do you say “cheesy” in Spanish. Not cheesy as in chips and queso, but cheesy as in “Titanic” or Gwen Stefani or Dancing With the Stars. Tonight we visited our friends Pablo and Samuel and we had a great time talking while the kids watched videos. We started talking about funny words, and cheesy came up. It’s such a great word, and so impossible to describe even in English—you just know it when you see it. And especially hard to describe when, based on our earlier conversations, I knew that everything I considered cheesy, one of them would consider cool. And vice versa. I mean, they like American Idol, the Pussycat Dolls, and the above-mentioned Gwen Stefani. And, when I said I liked Enrique Iglesias, they cringed. So, the funny thing is that I looked up cheesy on a website that features discussion boards for words for students of other languages. And there was five pages, over fifty entries, debating the meaning and use of the word in English. Guess we’re not the only ones intrigued by the word. Check it out.
The other funny thing is that billion and the Spanish billion are totally different numbers. And after the four of us tried to discuss which was which--four liberal arts majors talking about math and talking in two different languages--I had pretty much forgotten what exactly a billion in English was, much less a billion in Espanol. Samuel’s brother, a computer engineer who probably could have straightened out atleast the Spanish billion, was drowned out by the more adamant, and more confused, voices. It was fun to be able to let loose and laugh at our inability to communicate on a seemingly simple matter.
