Getting the words right!

Here's a new bit of Spanish vocabulary, new to me anyway, found in a local paper: Furtivismo - ejemplo: gente (veraneantes y turistas) que recoge almejas de forma ilegal. Basically it means committing a minor crime, I think. The example, and the main thrust of the article, involves people on holiday taking advantage of the low tide to collect shellfish, clams in the example, illegally. And then presumably to go home and cook and eat them. I can remember years ago fishing for teeny tiny shrimps with my almost Spanish sister and making them into omelettes. (Which my daughter, in a fit of English craziness, refused to eat on the grounds that we had caught the shrimps on the beach and therefore they might be dirty!)

How many English people on a beach would know where to begin collecting shellfish and which ones they could eat. I listened on the train one day to an English woman, clearly resident here, telling her children how she and her siblings had gone out with their parents picking blackberries in the English countryside. What's more, they had then gone home and made jam. Her children asked if they could go blackberrying next time they were in England and, by the way, did she know how to make jam? I didn't hear her answer to that last question but I am willing to bet she doesn't. My family regularly picked wild blackberries and we all helped with the jam-making but I would still need to look it up if I wanted to make some now.

Old skills disappear: not just jam making but knitting, crochet, dressmaking, stuff that we used to take for granted and, indeed, began to learn in primary school. Here in Spain you still find haberdashers, fabric shops, woolshops and the like. In England they have become difficult to locate. Specialist woolshops selling fancy yarn at extortionate prices exist in twee places like Hebden Bridge but no longer do you find a woolshop on the average high street. And the younger generation are praised highly for being able to knit a scarf!!!! Oh dear! I am beginning to sound old and cranky!

As I travelled on the bus yesterday I went past a shop with an English name, "Every Ways". I have no idea what they sold but I wanted to stop and give them a grammar lesson, explaining that "every" works just like "cada" in Spanish and is followed by a singular noun. Good grief! I keep coming across examples like this. At the top of the up escalator in Pontevedra station a large notice says "No Trespassing", which is not quite the same as "No Entry". And I came across a shop selling shoes and bags and other bits and pieces: purses and belts and fancy scarves. Across the bottom of the window it said, again in "English", "Shoes and Complements". Somebody had not found out that "complementos" translates as "accessories".

You see, it's not just menus that are poorly translated. It happens all over the place. And I know that the reverse happens in England. I come across awful French and Spanish in shops and restaurants there too. It's just not quite so ubiquitous.

Here, English is super-fashionable and even though everyone tells you that they, the Spanish, are really bad at learning foreign languages, everyone still feels they know enough to splash it around on public signs with great confidence!