30 Anuses

As appalling as it may be to literary professionals and grammar nazis, it's not altogether surprising that the English written language is becoming increasingly less recognizable in casual forums on the internet, or in text conversations over phones. With chatting, texting, Facebook and Twitter updates, and our dwindling attention spans and patience, we've manged to turn the internet and our mobile phones into figurative battlefields for the assault on the formal written language. We've hacked up words to save a few milliseconds typing one or two less letters (rite?), or for others, just to sound kinda "cool," like dis. Punctuation has suffered as "..." has replaced the period and the comma, hardly leaving the need for a capitalized letter.

Since moving to Spain, I've realized it's not just English, as the written Spanish language is being equally mangled all over the Internet. I often find words that I don't understand and can't translate because it's a poorly written version of the actual word. Rodri and I both had to be extra careful in the beginning of our long-distance relationship, when our communication still solely consisted of emails and chatting, because we were both writing in our respective languages and having to translate the response before replying, so as you can see, something so common as typing just "q" for the word "que" in Spanish would confuse me during that stage because the translation would be choppy and have random "q's" all throughout. It wasn't a huge adjustment for me, as I tend to stray away from abbreviations, even opting against Happy Bday or Merry Xmas which are commonly used and accepted abbreviations. I do take my own fair share of shortcuts that I deem to be more useful than offensive, including sometimes just typing the "q" for "que" in Spanish as it's nearly every other word, and often leaving out the accents, mainly for two reasons, I don't always know where they go, and my American programmed devices don't include them. It's not uncommon to see native Spanish speakers leaving off some accents in their informal writing, but there are certain accents that give a word a whole new meaning if overlooked, and others that just make you sound really silly if you try saying the word without the accent. Of course, I  learned the importance of accents the hard way, most notably how the word año (year) changes to anus (ano) if you leave off the accent.

I'm not sure how many times I must have asked someone "how many anuses do you have?" when trying to ask how old they are. I was shocked to realize the meaning of a sentence could change so drastically if it faults a little squiggly line. It's because in Spanish to ask how old someone is, the literal translation is "how many years do you have?" (cuantos años tienes?) and if you take out the accent in the word year, you get the word anus, wonderful (I do realize I left off the accent over the "a" in "cuantos" and my question lacks that upside down question mark before the sentence, but those are some of the shortcuts I choose to take since I don't have a Spanish keyboard). 

I remember when I moved here it was still hard to understand the spoken language since everyone talked so fast, differently, and with varying accents depending on what part of Spain they're from. I became familiar with some of the common questions I'd be asked, like "de donde eres?" (where are you from?) and I'd get a little thrill each time from holding one of my first "mini conversations." Sometimes people would snicker and say how American my accent is, well duh, I'm American, but I'll never forget the time someone I had just met asked me how old I was, and out of excitement for understanding the question and in anticipation to respond, I smiled big, and proudly blurted out nothing other than "I HAVE 30 ANUSES!" Sometimes people correct my Spanish or my pronunciation (always appreciated) but I revert back to my erroneous usage out of habit, but that time, I never forgot or made that mistake again.


Yesterday, more than a year after living here, I unintentionally found the accent "ñ" on my itouch. Apparently all this time, all I had to do was hover my finder over the "n" for it to appear. Now if I could just find the shortcuts to the accents on my other non-Apple devices. Well at least I found it in time to not have to type "Happy New Anus" come the new year!