Spanish for Dummy Travelers

Spanish spoken here

One of the staff at the Antisocial Network says that he's qualified to be a world traveler because, or so he claims, he can say "beer" in ten different languages. He admits that he's at a slight disadvantage in some countries, however, because he can only say "bathroom" in nine of them (rim shot!). We can't confirm his count, but we do know that he can say "Una cerveza, por favor," and after quatro o cinco cervezas, he can ask "¿Donde esta el baño?" with the best of them. It makes no difference that, or so we've been told, he speaks Spanish with a French accent. Even if that's true, it's a safe bet he's more fluent than Louie Doverspike, who totally screwed the pooch by pretending to share his expertise in "Common Spanish Words" for USAToday TravelTips (another Demand Media website). God help anyone who needed that advice...

Louie started by "explaining" the Spanish articles el, la, los and las; and more or less got them right – though he didn't bother explaining why Spanish has four definite articles comparable to the English "the"; nor did he address the indefinite articles. He then compounded his obvious lack of knowledge by claiming that

"Other popular articles include 'de,' which means 'of' or 'from,' and 'a,' which means 'to' or 'at.'"

Funny: we were pretty sure that of, from, to, and at are all prepositions; Louie, not to mention that the use of the word "popular" in this context is quite frankly ridiculous. Continuing with his language "lesson," Doverspike shared this interesting tidbit: "Many different greetings in Spanish depend upon context for their use. The most generic greeting is 'hola,' meaning 'hello.' Others are specific to the time of day, such as 'buenas dias,' 'buenas tardes' and 'buenas noches,' which mean 'good day,' 'good afternoon' and 'good evening,' respectively." Clearly, Louie doesn't speak Spanish: if he did, he'd know that días (not "dias") is masculine, so the proper adjective is buenos, not buenas - and it idiomatically means "good morning," not "good day." Louie continued his bilingual dumbassery by being apparently unaware of the difference between the verbs estar and ser, and leaving out diacritical marks necessary for proper pronunciation. For instance, he says to ask "Donde esta..." for "where is," though the resulting mispronunciation (the verb form should be está) actually translates to "Where this?"

Doverspike also cherry-picked some words he called "common nouns"; words that included bano (which he claimed means "bathroom" – the word's actually baño), trabajo, comida, agua and cena. Louie also claimed that

"'Hora' means hour and can be used to request the time in a rudimentary manner, such as in 'Que hora?' or 'What hour?'"

...which, as any third-grader studying Spanish can tell you, is actually "¿Que hora es?" and isn't "rudimentary" at all.

Doverspike's little article got words wrong, ignored necessary diacritical marks, messed up gender agreement, and in general insulted a language spoken by more than 400 million people worldwide; not to mention tens of millions of Spanish speakers in the USA. Small wonder we think Louie richly deserves to be the Dumbass of the Day – o en Español, El Cabrón del Día.

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