By Juan Montoya
Call it Spanglish, bastardized English, or even South Texas patios, but the language spoken here is unique and particularly creative.
Sometimes its funny. Other times it's downright crude. And sometimes it has nothing to do with the words spoken by other people. Let's go through a few examples.
Remember Chappaquiddick?
You know, the one-car accident Friday, July 18, 1969 that forever tarnished Sen. Ted Kennedy's reputation and resulted in the death of his 28-year-old companion Mary Jo Kopechne. It was determined that Kennedy had been negligent and he pleaded guilty to a charge of leaving the scene of a crash causing personal injury. He later received a two-month suspended jail sentence.
Well, at about that time when the news was hitting the airwaves, I had a friend who was working at Great Society social service agency in Mercedes who considered himself quite the galan. There wasn't a clerk or new employee at the agency who had not been targeted by the guy whose name was Marcos Chapa.
One day he invited a new hire for dinner and the girl – feeling somewhat obligated to Marcos for her job – she accepted. After a nice dinner and drinks, Marcos drove out to one of the irrigation and flood control ditches by the levees in the area and after a while tried to put the make on her.
As the action got a bit too heavy for the girl, she stepped out of the car and yelled: "Chapa quit it. Chapa quit it."
And that's how Chappaquiddick came to be identified with the ditches in Mercedes.
That's just one example. Hark back to the days of the Iran hostage crisis. That was when 52 American diplomats and citizens were held hostage for 444 days from November 4, 1979, to January 20, 1981 in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
Before it was all over, the Shah of Iran had fled to Lackland Air Force base in San Antonio and hard-line clerics, the ayatollahs, in Iran demanded the U.S. turn him over to them for execution.
Now, San Antonio is has four military bases and the town is full of military personnel at all hours of the day. So ti was surprising when the top brass issued an order that soldiers should stay away from the West Side (Zarzamora Street, in particular) because of possible threats against them from Iranian extremists.
Everyone was puzzled and when the military was asked why the area was declared off limits, the answer surprised everyone. It seems that military intelligence had overheard some customers ask the waiter at a Mexican restaurant during a particularly brisk day what dishes they had on special for the cold.
"Ay atole," the waiter had answered.