A History of English Language

A history of the english language 364
Mi querido Rafa: Election Day plus two and God’s in his heaven and
Noddy’s in his; regarding each other with suspicion, one would imagine.
Pues sí, it’s in all the papers y no te traigo noticias que tú no sepas.
Ahora solamente es asunto de pick up the pieces and the litter.
Our newest commissioner is more restrained, less exuberant, as it
were—eso de ‘as it were’ es frasecita de Ira; le gusta y la usa venga o no
al caso. Sorry, no free samples, Si no se cuida, la gente le va a poner
Asitwere, at the very least.
Dear Rafe: Election Day plus two and God’s in His heaven, and Noddy’s
in his, regarding each other with suspicion, one would imagine.
Well, sir, it’s in all the papers, and Fm not telling you something you
don’t already know. And now, it’s simply a matter of picking up the
pieces and the litter.
Our newest commissioner is more restrained, less exuberant, as it
were. This last is now a pet phrase. As such, he uses it at the drop of a
jaw. If he’s not careful, the instructed electorate will start calling him
Asitwere. At the very least. 44
To the extent that dialects are defined by word choices, the lexicon of Hispanic American
English presents a more contemporary picture than the oldfashioned rural vocabulary of
traditional dialect studies. While fewer and fewer speakers know that a whiffletree
involves a harness or that a spider can be a skillet, words used to trace isoglosses in Hans
Kurath’s Word Geography, a growing population in the United States and in other
English-speaking countries knows the meaning of tapas, seviche, and luminaria. The
categories of borrowed words include politics, from which we get Sandinista, Contra,
Fidelist; food and drink, represented by nachos, burrito, sangria, margarita; and
ethnicity, with Chicano and Chicana, Latino and Latina as prominent designations. 45 In
the past, Spanish borrowings have typically marked the regional dialects of Western and
border states—California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado—and then some have
gained general currency in American English. A few of these words have become part of
world English. Contact between Spanish and English will be a continuing source for the
introduction of new or revived Spanish words into regional varieties of English
44
Rolando Hinojosa, Mi querido Rafa (Houston, 1981), p. 44; Dear Rafe (Houston, 1985), p. 51.
Used by permission of Arte Público Press.
45
For more on Spanish loanwords, see Garland Cannon, “Recent borrowings from Spanish into
English,” in Spanish Loanwords in the English Language: A Tendency towards Hegemony
Reversal, ed. F.R.González (Berlin, 1996), 41–60.