Table One

When I was 7 I took my first Spanish class. It literally changed my life, or at least set the course. Until we moved when I was in the fifth grade, I studied Spanish in the progressive Old Country Road Elementary School on Long Island, NY. I picked it up again in 8th grade and studied it throughout High School. I majored in Spanish at Georgetown, spent my junior year in Madrid and upon graduating settled in Barcelona, Spain for 9 years. Along the way I studied French, Italian and Catalan. When I returned to the States to do a Masters in Teaching English and Spanish, I learned how to write Arabic and speak at an elementary level. I have since studied bits of Mayan and Turkish. It is no wonder that I cofounded a language school and that I have remained fascinated with languages and culture all my life.

As executive director of the International Language Institute of MA., Inc. for 22 years, I have had the wonderful opportunity to travel - for recruiting, giving workshops, evaluating schools for our accrediting agency and visiting friends. For the past 3 years I have been invited to attend the Fedele Conference in Spain, which is hosted by the Spanish Tourist Board and regional tourists boards in Spain. Late September of this year I travelled to Granada in Andalucia, Spain for my third conference. It was a busy, tiring, interesting, fun, informative time. I consider myself the local authority on Spanish schools in Spain and am happy to talk to people about their needs and interests regarding Spanish study in Spain.

On the Sunday after the conference, I travelled with about 24 people to Guadix, a city about an hour from Granada where many people actually live in caves. At lunchtime we descended into a restaurant cave and I sat with a group of international agents: Dr. J L Kettle-Williams from the U.K., the Derlers from Austria, Paula Giambelluca from Italy and Birger Reinhardt Larsen from Norway, among others. We had a wonderful time and J named our group Table One. Hence the title of my first blog. It was there that my ideas for this blog became clear.

I love language and culture articles, jokes, stories, arcane bits of information, etc. Puns, funny misspellings, double entendres are music to my ears. My interest in starting this blog is to share
this kind of information and perhaps I can entice Table One to join the dialog. All are welcome to join Table One. J said that what he has studied (I believe it was sociolinguistics) isn't going to save the world. I disagree. I think understanding language and culture may be the only thing that can do it. So courtesy of J - here is the first language tidbit.

In the 60's, the Peace Corps was in Paraguay. The Guarani had a word HASY - pronounced hasúl that meant "He/she is not well" or "There's a problem". The volunteers began to use it mixed in with their English and it travelled back to the States with them as hassle, which is still used today of course.

For many people, this is useless information. For those of you who find it fascinating, or at least somewhat interesting, I invite you to join Table One. I'll post every few days, read and share your comments. The older I get, the more I want to learn and language and culture are my favorite subjects.