I knew a Spanish-speaking woman who was looking for sheets for a bed. At the store, she summoned her courage and asked for help from the sales clerk. “I wanna sheet,” the woman declared, with her intended long ee sound coming out more like the i in ship. The clerk was taken aback for a second, and then pointed her towards the ladies’ restroom.
Many years ago, a dear friend from Costa Rica explained to me that he couldn’t tell the difference between the words leave, leaf, and live. To English-speakers, it’s easy: “Leave the leaf on the tree and let it live.” To my friend, he just heard leef, leef, and leef.
That same friend once befuddled someone by his comment, “nice chews.” He said it while looking down at the man's feet, and eventually the guy understood that it was a compliment on his footwear. Later, when wanting to extinguish a smoke, my Costa Rican friend asked someone for what sounded like an ostrich. With no large, flightless birds in the vicinity, and given that he had the remains of a lit cigarette in his fingers, it was determined that an ashtray was the object of the request. Context is everything.
It wasn’t that this individual was incapable of manipulating tongue, palate, and teeth to create the correct pronunciation. As another friend pointed out: “You can say chews and shicken, so why can't you get shoes and chicken right?”
My wife, Maria, is no stranger to mix-ups in pronunciation (did she just say Medicaid or Mary Kay? Did she have to catch the bus or her boss?) Her funniest misinterpretation of a word was while admiring a flowering plant on the window sill. “It’s growing really well,” she told me as she gently touched the petals.
“African violet?” I asked.
Without missing a beat, she responded: “I don’t care if it’s a freakin’ violet, it still looks good.”
With that, I turn over another leaf.