Word: embarrassment
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Parents' speaking a foreign language can embarrass children. Riki Hayashi, 6, shocked his Japanese-born mother Kaori last year by announcing that he did not want her to speak her native tongue when his schoolmates came to visit at their Culver City, Calif., home. "All his friends are American, and in his concept of himself he is American," sighs Kaori. The parents' poor command of English can prove awkward. Children are pressed into service for their immigrant parents in all kinds of circumstances: when the electric company sends a dunning notice, the landlord needs a lease signed, a policeman needs...
Comfortable as this slang may be, confusion sometimes results, especially since the borrowed English is generally pronounced as if it were Spanish. Spanglish-speaking chicanos, for instance, have taken to using embarrassar to mean "embarrass," which is what happens when that word is mistaken for embarazar, a Spanish word that sounds the same but means "to become pregnant." Moreover, many U.S. Hispanics have grown up hearing so much Spanglish that they are not sure which words are really English. Says Pedro Pedraza of the Puerto Rican studies department at Manhattan's Hunter College: "I've heard of Puerto Rican kids...
...unless he's trying to embarrass them by showing up at all their cocktail parties...
...counter, and then he'll direct his stentorian bellow towards he rear booths: "Hey Lucy, put your feet on the floor!" "Lucy" is his collective name for all women; when asked about it he le laurels, surprised. "I don't know--'Lucy,' it sounds cuckoo. I use it to embarrass them a little bit, I guess, so they won't do whatever they're doing again." His co-worker John says, "I think Ralph really takes pride in his nickname...
...Jaruzelski's decision to prosecute the men publicly offered fellow Poles an unprecedented glimpse into the workings of the country's secret police and defused, at least temporarily, the explosive anger over Popieluszko's death. There is speculation that the murder was engineered by government hard-liners to embarrass Jaruzelski and his Interior Minister, General Czeslaw Kiszczak. But the carefully controlled trial left many unanswered questions and the pervasive feeling that the authorities may have protected high-ranking officials from being implicated in the killing. Some Poles believed that - Piotrowski deserved the death penalty, and there was widespread skepticism that...