Language Barriers

As some of you know, my husband’s (also known as The Mexican) mother tongue is Spanish. He speaks English pretty darn well but on occasion, we have some interesting examples of miscommunication.

A couple of weeks ago as I was getting ready for work and it was a bit colder than normal.

“Bungle up! It’s chilly outside.”

Yes, he said ‘bungle up’. Despite my correcting him a million times on how he should be saying bundle up, he claims that I don’t know English very well. I’ve also explained that this way of expressing himself is suggesting that getting prepared for the cold makes people clumsy. Yet, there is no chance in a cold hell that he will ever fix this mistake in his verbal dictionary of idioms and phrases.

Another one, which oddly has to do with weather, too, is the popular ‘wind chill factor’ component of temperature in the middle of winter. Often a range of temperatures is given for a cold winter day but an additional feature is mention about what it feels like if there is wind in the forecast. That is known as the wind chill factor. So it could be 20-25 degrees but the wind chill factor will make it seem like it’s perhaps 10-15 degrees. This assists in planning how you will get dressed or just give the awareness of how it really feels like to be outside. Oh but this is not how my husband explains this phenomena. He calls it the ‘wind shield factor’. I’m not sure when he created this new phenomena but it’s obviously what he thought they said. No matter how many times I tell him it’s wind chill factor, he insists that I have a chunk of wax in my ear that blocks my ability to hear what the meteorologists are really saying.

So I’ve stopped correcting him. I just make fun of him about it. And I tell everyone in the hope that maybe one day some one will have a nervous breakdown on his misuse of these common phrases and will make him change his ways. I’m pretty sure that won’t happen but at least now you will know that you didn’t hear my husband incorrectly. He did say ‘bungle up’ and ‘wind shield factor’.