Vulgar

One day, I was practicing the alphabet with some of the kids because they were clamoring for stickers and wanted to show off that they could recite the whole thing without even knowing what they were saying.* After having them practice by pointing to letters at random, I decided it would be good to work on pairs of letters that sound similar. So I pointed at C and S, N and Ñ, B and V. No problem.

Then I pointed at Q and K and suddenly one of the more precocious (read smart-alecky) students starts shouting "Don Miguel vulgar!" and all the kids are hooting and tittering,** and for days I had no idea what set them off...until I went to Quinta los Chavalos (the other school, where I taught English to college students) and one of the teachers there kindly explained to me that "cuca" is apparently an extremely offensive word for penis. The learning never ends.


*It's pretty easy to say something that sounds a lot like a-b-c-d-e-f-g... without really making any connection between the forms you see and the sounds they represent. As I (coincidentally) began studying Hindi a month ago and have been forced to learn an entirely new alphabet for the first time since I was two, I can unexpectedly sympathize with them.

**Wouldn't "Hooting and Tittering" be an awesome name for a folk-rock band?