the joys of language

This blog post is PG-13. Not that I know of any young people reading my blog.

Slang never makes any sense. Three common phrases are legal or optimo ("optimal") where we would use cool (I'm sure there's a distinction--optimo seems to me to be more for when something is really good), and droga as an exclamation where we would say fiddlesticks.

The word for condom is camizinha, litterally "little t-shirt" (I would have gone with "little raincoat" but no one consulted me on the matter). This means that when someone actually needs a little t-shirt (like for a child) s/he needs to say it with the adjective pequeno and not using a diminutive form.

Portuguese has nasalized vowels that don't exsist in English. As in most languages there are words that sound nearly identical to non-native speakers but are actually quite different. Consider, for example, the nasalized pão, bread vs. non-nasal pau, wood. As in English, the word is slang for male anatomy. Pão de queijo is a traditional cheese bread. I'm sure every day foreigners go into stores and mean to ask a man if they carry cheese bread:

"Você tem pão de queijo?"

but actually ask:

"Você tem pau de queijo?"

Of course he'll know what the person is asking and not say anything, but it's got to either annoy or amuse him depending on his personality and the mood he's in that day.

God only knows how many innappropriate things I've said without realizing it. It just comes with the territory of learning a new language.