"¡No tengo interés in meeting you!"

[muckefuck]

This morning on the train I sat next to a finalist in the Obnoxious Passenger Olympics. There's never a good time for an acrimonious breakup call with your girlfriend, but it's hard to think of a worse one than a rush-hour el ride. He had his face turned to and almost pressed against the window for "privacy" (such as it was) while he yelled at her for the entire 20-minute ride.

It would have been unbearable if not for the fact that he was code-switching madly, which piqued my academic interest/ He seemed to use Spanish almost exclusively at the most emotional moments, but "fucking" was always in English. This yielded such gems as:

¡Cambia your fucking ways!
¡Calla tu fucking boca!

I noticed the same tendency to restate utterances in both languages that I noticed with my friend Roberto on the phone to his cousin (e.g. "¿Has ido al trabajar? Did you go to work?"), e.g. "¡Deja ya! ¡Deja ya! ¡Deja ya! Get over it!"

Comments

[wiped.livejournal.com]

are you sure you're not hearing either ¿Has ido al trabajo, or possibly ¿Has ido a trabajar? the sentence you wrote, "¿Has ido al trabajar?" doesn't sound natural at all to me, and i don't think it's grammatical.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I couldn't remember for sure which of those two possibilities it was, so it looks like--in the process of typing, deleting, and retyping--I ended up crossbreeding them. I meant to settle on ¿Has ido al trabajo?.

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

... and you have to wonder why, if the "most emotional" thing has credence, WHY "fucking" is ALWAYS in English. Surely "chingada" or "fregada", "cojada", etc. or SOMETHING some "oomph".

[ursine1.livejournal.com]

I have a porteño friend who always uses fucking instead of one of the castellano equivalents. I rarely here fucking here in Barcelona. So maybe this a is a geographical thing.

Carles

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I think it may be even more idiosyncratic than that. Most hispanohablantes on the train would use chingad@ or pinche before they'd throw in fucking. But most of the speakers I've run into don't codeswitch quite that liberally.