D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
July
2008
Speaking "New Mexican"
Hey, you there in the "arroyo" — watch out for the "cholla." And don't you know it's "monsoon season"?
Since moving here, we've experienced first-hand the "one of our 50 is missing" phenomenon we used to read about — incredulously — on the back page of New Mexico Magazine every month. Yes, there really are people who don't realize that New Mexico is part of the United States, who can't hear the "New" and think you live in Mexico.
Silly as that misperception might be, we've also come to realize that there is a different language you have to learn when you move to the desert Southwest. I don't mean Spanish, or even the lovely, liquid "Spanglish" you hear in stores or at the post office, that graceful and seemingly effortless shifting from Spanish to English and back.
No, I mean words — like "Spanglish," for instance — that you simply don't hear growing up someplace like South Dakota, or that have a sharply different meaning here in New Mexico. There's a vocabulary unique to the Southwest, just as I guess there must be in other parts of the country. (In South Dakota, for example, "flurries" means any snowfall less than a foot deep. "Chilly" would refer to the temperature between freezing and really "cold," which begins at about 30 below zero — the point where you might want to put a sweater on.)
The weather is the most obvious difference, linguistically. Growing up, we thought of a "monsoon" as a prolonged rainstorm peculiar to certain parts of Asia. In New Mexico and southern Arizona, though, the "monsoon season" means that eagerly awaited span of July and August when most of the year's rain falls, usually in the form of thunderstorms that build up every afternoon. Not only are the "monsoons" prized for their precipitation, we learned, but also for the way they break the summer heat, dropping the mercury as much as 20 degrees.
So we've trained our brains now to picture "monsoons" as afternoon thunderstorms that fill the arroyos with flash floods — sort of like the desert taking a vigorous cold shower. Gone are mental pictures of rice paddies and drenched Asian people in conical straw hats seeking refuge from the rain in thatched huts. The drenched Asians have been replaced in our minds by equally sodden Southwesterners racing for their cars as the sky splits open and spoils the July 4 festivities, right on schedule.
Those "arroyos" that get overrun with water on the rare occasions when it rains? We grew up calling them "gullies" or "ditches" — much less romantic-sounding terms. Now we like to tell friends back up north about the "arroyo" at the back of our property, hoping the word will suggest to them that our house must be a "hacienda" of grand style and proportions much like that of Don Diego de la Vega in "Zorro." ("I will pursue them across the arroyo," sounds like something Zorro might have said. Not "I'll go get 'em over the gully.")
The word "humidity" has required redefinition, too, of course. Living in places like Cincinnati, we foolishly thought of "humidity" as a measure of wetness in the air: Just how miserable would we be this summer day? Now we realize that "humidity," when talked about at all hereabouts, refers to degrees of dryness. Who knew that "humidity" could even be measured in the single digits? But there it was, just the other day on our weather gizmo — 5. Not 50 or even 15. No, one of the LCD digits had not burned out. Just plain 5.
We've also happily redefined "ice" as something that comes from the freezer section of the refrigerator. We grew up fearful of "ice," understanding the word to mean inches-thick layers coating sidewalks and streets and sending would-be pedestrians to chiropractors. Worse, sometimes "ice" would fall from the skies, temporarily liquid enough to cling to power lines and rend them as it froze. Here, we've learned, "ice" is what you put in the blender to make frozen margaritas.
Still, old habits die hard. Sometimes we catch ourselves eyeing a steep driveway and thinking, "Boy, that must be bad when it's icy."
For that matter, "driveway" is another word that means something quite different here. In places where snow and ice must be shoveled to make a path for your car, "driveways" are paved surfaces that depart from dead flatness at your peril. In the Southwest, "driveway" can mean a rutted trail of rocks and compacted dirt, of infinite curviness and elevation change. These "driveways" are distinguishable from the surrounding landscape only by a minutely lesser covering of vegetation.
It's that vegetation that really requires a whole new dictionary, by the way. We'd never even heard of "cholla" before, and would have pronounced it "choh-lah" if we had. (Even as I type this, my Microsoft Word spellchecker refuses to recognize "cholla" as a correctly spelled word.) I don't think "yucca" was in my vocabulary, either, except perhaps as a childhood expression of distaste for Brussels sprouts ("yucch-ahh!").
Those pretty white "datura" flowers? Another word that Word — which hails from Seattle, after all — flags as an alien misspelling. If we knew the species at all before coming here, it was "jimson weed," something vaguely recalled from cowboy movies as a plant the cattle ought not to eat.
Before we moved to New Mexico, the prolific "poppy" did not call to mind hillsides in the Bootheel covered in color as though God had gone wild with a paintbrush. Outside the Southwest, "poppies" are the stuff opium is made from, or a reminder of the Flanders fields of World War I that VFW members sell on Veterans Day.
"Creosote" was not a term we associated with bushes, much less with the smell of the desert after one of those all-too-infrequent rainstorms. In the Midwest, "creosote" is sticky, smelly black gunk that's applied to telephone poles. Telling a Midwesterner, "Oh, I love the smell of creosote after it rains," gets you a funny look.
"Goathead," of course, we'd previously assumed to mean the head of a goat, perhaps with two horns but not with multiple ways to jab you. "Honey, help me get this goathead out of my foot" is not something you hear in Minnesota, at least not from sane people.
Some of the critters scuttling along through that New Mexico vegetation require language lessons, too. To folks elsewhere, "javelina" just looks like you've misspelled "javelin." We'd mostly thought of "packrat" as referring to a person with too many possessions, not to an actual rodent that hides "cholla" pieces and "goatheads" in your woodpile. And along the Mexican border, interestingly, "coyote" can refer to both a four-legged and a two-legged variety of critter.
Then there's the language of food. With the overzealousness typical of converts, I've made it a personal crusade to teach the rest of the world to spell the spicy peppers "chile." The "jalapeo" (note the tilde) is a variety of "chile" pepper. The meaty stew favored by Texans and tailgaters is "chili." I figure if NMSU's Chile Pepper Institute spells the plant with an "e," that's good enough for me and should be good enough for the New York Times.
We've likewise learned that in New Mexico, "menudo" does not refer to a once-popular boy band. Sure, we made this mistake a few times: Seeing "Today's Special: Menudo" on the letter board outside a Mexican restaurant, we'd comment, "Gee, honey, look — Menudo! They must have really dropped off the charts if they're reduced to playing at Don Diego's Casa Mexicana." But now we know better — albeit not yet through personal tasting experience. (Sorry, it still sounds, well, "yucch-ahh.")
You might even say that "salsa" means something different in New Mexico. It doesn't come out of an "Old El Paso" jar, for one thing. Often we'll sample a fiery, flavorful New Mexican salsa and think how friends and family in South Dakota would react — screaming in agony, racing to shove their open mouths under the water faucet, trying to rip their blazing tongues out of their heads. Then we smile and dunk another tortilla chip. (Yes, we've also learned that "tortilla chips" do not have to come out of a plastic bag labeled "Tostitos.")
I already knew what a "tomatillo" is from my experiments with Mexican cuisine. But it's nonetheless gratifying to be able to find these tart little green tomato-looking fruits (actually, closer to the gooseberry botanically), wrapped in their pale green, crinkly, papery husks, in the grocery store alongside more mundane fare like celery.
Oddly, however, the grocery checkout clerks don't always recognize "tomatillos" when I unload my cart. Sometimes they'll even ask me what these green things are, or how I prepare them. I'm delighted to answer, of course, reveling in my mastery of at least one piece of the local lingo.
But I try not to show off and go overboard. Saying, "They're 'tomatillos,' and I use them to make 'salsa' that I serve during 'monsoon season' — you know, when the rain drives the 'javelinas' out of the 'arroyos,'" just gets you stared at in the grocery checkout line. Trust me.
To recover from that embarrassment and quickly change the subject, I've learned to add, "I also want to buy a bag of 'ice.' Not the sidewalk kind — the frozen-margarita kind."
David A. Fryxell practices speaking "New Mexican" as editor of Desert Exposure.