¿Qué?

My grasp of the Spanish language is so pitifully low that the other day I nearly made a stupid mistake; the type of mistake that we often smugly laugh at Johnny Foreigner for making. I was travelling on a bus from Madrid to Valencia and was sat in a window seat, facing the sun. I was getting quite warm, so decided to explain to the man sitting next to me that I would like to move to a cooler seat on the other side of the bus. I'd noticed on a restaurant menu earlier that the word for hot food is 'caliente' so I thought I could just say to the man "Perdone, soy caliente" and he'd stand up to let me out. However, I wasn't too confidant that I'd made the right choice of verb (I sometimes have difficulty remembering which indicates a permanent, and which a temporary state). So I said nothing and the sun went behind some clouds anyway, so it didn't matter.

I learned later that 'soy caliente' would have told the man next to me that I was declaring myself to posses the personal characteristic of being hot, as in: "I'm HOT!" Not exactly a modest claim for anyone to make, I'm sure you'll agree. Notwithstanding that the (only) half-correct term should have been 'estoy caliente', this too would have been inappropriate. Apparently the correct phrase is 'tengo calor', meaning I have heat. Much neater.

I'm sure that you weren't expecting a Spanish lesson today, but I'm using this as a metaphor for how when we fail to communicate properly, people can often receive an incorrect impression of us. Having two versions of the verb 'to be' (as the Spanish do) helps these situations. For example, you could be sitting with a friend listening to his conversation and you could announce: I am bored and your friend would not know whether you meant that your pathetic life was going nowhere, or whether you were simply finding his conversation to be less than stimulating. It gets even more complicated if you were to say: I am enlightened for what would that tell your friend? That he is efficient at explaining matters to you, or that you had found inner peace for yourself?

Well, I'm off to Oslo for a few days now, so no blog until next week. It'll be a Norwegian lesson then, I expect.