I've told this before but many many years ago when my husband and I had first married, we were at a laundromat and two hispanic women were speaking spanish and kept looking over at us and laughing. I quietly joked to my husband that they thought he was a weenie for doing "women's work"..... he looked right at them and broke out some long sentence in German (which of course I did not understand!) and you should have seen the look on the faces of those women! You would have thought he had slapped them both. They don't like it when they geet the tables turned on them.
Good for your hubby! I hope you pretended to understand his every syllable This response of his probably made them consider that if he could speak German, he might very well know Spanish too, and could possibly understand every word they had said! Bet they were embarrassed to get exposed and nailed in the same manner. Great anecdote you have shared. Thanks.
I’m doing that the next time that happens to me which is often here in the Hispanic region of the us
A ‘pinche pendejo’ usually gets them to STFU.
A ‘pinche pendejo’ usually gets them to STFU.
My wife is a Spaniard (Celtic, from NW Spain); many of the Inca-types around here assume that only people that look like them speak Spanish, and if they say something assuming she doesn’t understand she quickly corrects that misconception (in Spanish). Just as many Americans assume Spanish speakers all look Mexican, many Hispanics assume the same thing. I speak Spanish (learned on my own in an environment where there is no lack of opportunity to practice, then augmented by marrying a Spaniard), and it puzzles them to no end. Maybe they assume nobody would see any value in learning it; nowadays many jobs in my area are closed to you if you don’t speak it.
My SIL did that in Costco recently. He & my daughter were eating, and noticed they were the only ones speaking English. Several were nodding at them while talking in Spanish, so my SIL (2 tours in Iraq) began talking to my daughter in Arabic.
After he gave a long comment, she asked what one of the words meant. My SIL replied, “That means fat” in a loud enough whisper to be overheard. It didn’t, but he figured no one would know.
There was a dead silence at the tables around them. They finished their food, got up and left.