This custom is based on King Herod, who ordered all male children under three (the santos inocentes) in Bethlehem to be killed, hoping to avert being dethroned by Jesus who had been born a short time before.

So here’s your chance to pull a practical joke on someone, then call them an inocente palomita.

Adulto – Una persona que ya dejó de crecer verticalmente y ahora crece horizontalmente.

Banquero – Un hombre que te presta su paraguas cuando hace mucho sol y te lo reclama cuando empieza a llover.

Clásico – Un libro que todos admiran y nadie lee.

Conferencia – La confusión de un sólo hombre multiplicada por el número de personas presentes.

Esterilizar – Lo que haces con el chupón de tu primer hijo al hervirlo por 15 minutes y lo que haces con el chupón de tu último hijo al soplarle.

Hardware – La parte de la computadora que recibe los golpes cuando el software no funciona.

Impaciencia – Esperar con mucha prisa.

Pesimista - Un optimista con experiencia.

Polvo – Lodo que se le ha exprimido todo el jugo.

Secreto – Algo que sólo le dices a una sóla persona a la vez.

Si se te ocurre alguna palabra como estas con su definición, escríbela en los comentarios.

Someone should work on their math
before they work on their grammar.

Found on reddit.

If you didn’t already notice, the joke is that it doesn’t matter if you want to say is or are, the fact is that the answer is 14 not 13. That aside, what is the right answer? Just for the record, I’d go with is, without getting into a grammatical discussion of the subject.

Five plus five is/are ten.
Our greatest asset is/are our libraries.
The thing I least like about rainy days is/are the grey clouds.

What do you think?

In Spanish it’s another story. As far as I know, in these cases the verb agrees in number with the object, not the subject. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Cinco mas cinco son diez.
Nuestro mejor recurso son nuestras bibiotecas.
La cosa que menos me gusta de los días lluviosos son las nubes grises.

The Daily Mail states “Monster plant grows 5ft in a weekend and bursts through greenhouse roof“, in a somewhat sensationalist, mostly interesting, and unfortunately misleading article. Let me highlight a few of the statements.

“Monster plant grows 5ft in a weekend and bursts through greenhouse roof”

It’s true that when the Maguey or Century Plant goes to seed, the stem does grow quickly, but who gave them permission to call it a “monster plant”? I think kudzu is more of a monster plant.

“A rare Mexican plant which flowers only once in its lifetime has bloomed in Britain.”

This photo:Wikipedia (Since I couldn’t find any of my own shots of flowering magueys at the moment.)

Anyone who has visited Mexico or the Southwestern US, knows this plant is by no means rare. It might only bloom once, but with so many of them around, the flowers are a common sight.

“It has grown steadily to dominate the south-eastern corner of the display, its crown of rather untidy but impressive succulent leaves spewing out across the gravel like some monstrous creation from the Little Shop of Horrors.”

I’ll cut them some slack because they obviously haven’t seen one of these plants before. But “Little Shop of Horrors”? What’s that? It just looks like a big Aloe Vera plant.

“Agave americana, which became known as the Century Plant in the mistaken belief that it blossomed only once in 100 years” …//… “The rush of sap which fuels the speedy growth of the plant is used to produce tequila.”

Yes, technically this plant is an Agave, but it’s *not* the variety used to produce Tequila. Tequila and Mescal are both produced from different versions of the Agave plant and this version, the Maguey, is not one of them. It is however used to produce Pulque, which you should try next time you’re in central Mexico.

But maybe the one most important thing you should know about this plant is– It’s not a cactus.

¿Como se llama?
And you know what the animal is called.

Perro
I don’t know if this has some other meaning, but I think it’s a cool design.

Inverted question mark.
Gotta remember the punctuation.

Colors
Try reading the words on this shirt, while saying the color that each word is written in. For green you would say blue.

Diacritical Thinking
Good thing Spanish doesn’t have this many accent marks!

Applesauce
Ok, it’s not a t shirt but I couldn’t resist. Especially since I have a 2-year-old girl.

Juan
You’re unique!

Piñata
Happy Birthday!

Fulana
Bonus points to whoever explains this shirt. (And I know what fulana means )

Cinco de Mayo
Five jars of mayonnaise.

Gringo
Short and sweet.

Most of these tee shirts come from either Cafepress or Busted Tees.

So here you go. Five* random things that you might not have known about Spanish or related to Spanish in some way.

*You might have noticed that I’m not to good at following directions, so I gave you five things instead of eight. Here’s the rules of the meme:

Share eight random facts about yourself, pick eight bloggers to keep the meme going, tell the eight bloggers that you tagged them, and of course include these rules in your post.

Since I broke the first rule, I’ll break the second and only tag 5 others. So… Osman, Zach, MissProfe, Aaron and Simon, you’re it.

Now, do you agree with him or disagree?

The proposed merger of languages is not without controversy. Some linguists argue that languages should not be controlled by a few decision-makers, but should evolve naturally, based on common usage. The economists and linguists promoting this merger counter that the cultural, economical and communicative benefits of this linguistic union greatly outweigh the negative effects of their prescriptivism. Others claim this move will alienate the three countries from other Spanish speaking countries, mainly in South and Central America.

It is unknown whether or not other Hispanophone countries will embrace this progressive thinking. Mexico, the world’s largest Spanish speaking country (in terms of speakers), will have a great impact on the success of this measure. Representatives from Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM) in Mexico City are expected release a response sometime next week. It is interesting to note that they weren’t included in the original discussions.

An estimated 88%, collectively, of the vocabulary of the three languages has common latin roots. Words that fall within this category will be analyzed, and the least common denominator adopted across all three languages. The remaining 12% of the vocabulary will be combined in a process to eliminate the “non-latin” elements and produce a new proto-word that will be taught in schools, and hopefully adopted in the three countries in question.

Be sure to check back tomorrow, I hope to write some more about this.

Brylyn from Consumerist reports “Saw this while shopping for ceiling lights in Home Depot.” Apparently someone confused Lorem ipsum with Spanish. Lorem ipsum, or Lipsum is common filler text for printers and graphic artists that has been used for hundreds of years while making mock-ups and creating designs. Any graphic artist, even if they didn’t know a word of Spanish should have been able to catch that.

If you get over the Lorem ipsum blunder and look at the text below it, you’ll notice that, while those are all Spanish words, the sentence is not all that understandable either. I think we need a new translator.