The Mother Tongue:..."El Pinche Guy Split With My Wifa" & Other Tales From A Strange Language...

By JUNIOR BONNER
Staff Writer

BROWNSVILLE, Texas - It is often said that the Texas-Mexico border has its own language. Well, it's true, but what exactly that language may be is anybody's guess. There is English and there is Spanish and there is a mixture of English and Spanish and there is a mixture of English profanity and Spanish profanity and there is a mixture of invented English and invented Spanish.

So, we ask: Is that why grammar comes so hard for residents of the Rio Grande Valley of Texas?

Is that why mastering the comma is an impossibility even for a Valley college graduate? And don't dare mention the lovely semi-colon; these people never have used it corrrectly, not that they care. Language in the Valley is an afterthought, outright bastardizations of established languages, the dominant being English and Spanish. So when a Valleyite says, "El pinche guy split with my wifa," he is telling you some other man took his woman. But he's doing it in romantic Spanish that almost sounds musical, as if he's singing to the Gods for forgiveness to do with self-imposed guilt. Mexicans here have no talent for letting their women go. They're stuck on knifings, and so they move toward the "guy."

If you listen closely, you'll soon note a pattern that has Valleyites using street lingo such as "orale" and "buey" in one out every two sentences. Both words mean more in real life than they do in real dictionaries. Is it a bad thing? No, not if everybody else is bastardizing the language. That, then, becomes local communication. In Cuba, the word for orange is "china;" in Mexico it is "naranja." China or naranja will bring you the citrus fruit, yes, although use "una china" for orange in the Valley and you will certainly get a frown or a stretched-out arm pointing you in the direction of the nearest bordello.

In order to converse here, one need only know the basics of English and Spanish. Vocabulary is of the elementary variety, so much so that when a Valleyite chances to use a heady word he generally uses it incorrectly. So they muddle about, not lost because, as we said, everyone else is muddling about. For an outsider, the experience is a moving migraine headache. Dumbing-down becomes the exercise of the day when hitting the coffee shops or cafes. And you can't get a clue from locals; they are indifferent to everything serious. Discuss language? They'll look at you as if facing a high school English test and say, "Otra vez con ese pedo?" It is a sort of verbal ballet where the dancers wear khakis and bright shirts from, say, Mervyn's Department Store - economic and run-of-the-mill fashion, in other words. The stumbling dance is fine, if you like stumbling dances that go on forever.

The Mother Tongue is at fault, although who really knows what language these people claim as their own. It is one language, mainly loud & bold Spanish in the cantinas (Eh, cabron. Pasame la pinche botella, buey!), and rough-edged, broken English at the unemployment office ("Jes, I worked two days in 2008..."). You'd have to hear it. There is something cute about it, cute in the same way that a clumsy dwarf dances that stumbling ballet.

It all goes to the thought-process. And when one is looking to make sense of the Valley Brain, well, language is the key. Action speaks louder than words, especially so when words make no sense. It's no different for an outsider ambling into this lingusitic cesspool than it would be for a Valleyite waltzing into a Zulu village in Africa. That would not be good for the ever-handy use of "orale" and "buey," but it would show that Valleyite how pathetically small his world is back home.

Something is amiss when the most popular phrase in the region is this one: "Por favor, mas chips..."

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