el crispito

Learning to speak a language properly is much harder than it seems. No amount of classroom education can teach you the very fine subtleties of when to use certain words instead of others. With the word el baño, if one were to look it up, he would find, among words of similar connotation, that it does mean "bathroom." In fact, if you went up to someone in Mexico and asked them, "¿Dónde está el baño?" chances are, they'd know what you wanted.

So what is wrong with calling a bathroom un baño? Nothing really, as far as making yourself understood goes. But it was curious to me that when I went to Mexico, I only saw that word used for "bathroom" on a couple of occasions.

Everywhere else, it was sanitarios.

And I have recently read that another acceptable term is excusados. Yet I'd never heard either of these before.

So why do most gringos know the bathroom as el baño? There are a few reasons why we Americans who learn Spanish as a secondary language might learn terms that are different from those actually used wherever we might go in the New World.

Spain - It seems that for years and years and years, the form of Spanish that was viewed as "proper" Spanish here in the United States was the kind spoken in Spain, and Latin American varieties were like bastard children that didn't know any better. Often textbooks and dictionaries show a bias toward Spanish vocabulary from Spain, without even mentioning Latin American terms that are used exclusively over here in the New World. Sometimes, they even tell you certain terms that are offensive (or at least naughty) in some Latin American countries. This is understandable if they are from a European company, but be aware of this when buying your dictionaries.

Generalization - In English, we have a lot of words for the pieces of furniture you sit on. You might sit on a recliner, a stool or a rocker, but they are all generally types of chairs. If you were trying to teach someone how to talk about these things without cluttering their minds with lots of different terms, you might just lump all of them together and call them all chairs. The same thing happens in Spanish textbooks.

Cognates - These are words that look or sound similar to words in English and have the same general meanings. Yet often these cognates have slight shades of meaning that they do not have in English, rendering their use a little odd when used in similar situations when we'd use them in English. The problem is, they're the easiest words to remember, because they're like the ones we use in our native language. For example, the English word except has three matching words in Spanish: menos, salvo and excepto. Because excepto is so similar to the word in English, it is easier to remember and more accessible than the other terms.

The Media - It's an old cliché in science fiction: aliens learn all they know of Earth culture from receiving our media transmissions. Yet it's not so far-fetched within our more immediate environment; the media has a great impact on the phrases we know from other languages. Just think of how much German you know from all those movies about Nazis in WWII. Now think how using many of those phrases on your trip through Germany would get you nasty looks.

If you are a student of Spanish and planning to use your Spanish in Mexico, be aware of these things. The biggest shock in my experience (and worthy of its own entry) came from trying to understand the Spanish descriptions of menu items in the restaurants in Mexico. Food terminology seems to have a lot of regional variations.

I don't know that any of the influences listed above really apply in the case of baño. My biggest fear is that in using calling the bathroom el baño, I'm using terminology that is too coarse and not what educated Spanish speakers would use. For now, when I'm north of the border, I'll go to el baño, but when in Mexico, I'll only use los sanitarios.