Life in Culebrón

Try telling a Spanish insurance company's price calculator that you've been driving since you were 17. They won't have it. Spaniards can't get a driving licence till they're 18 so the Spaniards believe that everywhere in the world starts driving at 18. The insurance company's database is built around the Spanish way of doing things. It's a good job I'm not from South Dakota. It used to be the same for foreign names. I'd want to register on a Spanish webpage. I was asked for both my surnames. As I don't have two surnames, and as it was often a required field, I'd try with an X or a dash. Sometimes that didn't work; I'm still Chris Thompson Nil on a fair few databases. It's a problem that has almost gone away nowadays. There's still space for two surnames but only the first will be compulsory. This is because, as I'm sure you know, most Spaniards have two surnames; one from the mother and the other from the father. The usual...

Lots of Spaniards find my name difficult to pronounce and so they tend to Hispanicize it. I'm Crees-toff-air. I know that Ruth gets Root and I know at least one person who generally uses his name in the Spanish form, Ricardo rather than Richard. He says it's easier than repeatedly correcting the mispronunciation.  Sometimes, of course, there is pure racism in the mispronunciation of a name, as in the case of Trump supporters and Kamala Harris or the renaming of someone because their name is "unpronounceable". Suggesting that a name is unsayable is a not too subtle form of belittling people by belittling the culture they come from. Last year's Twitter storm over the University teacher who suggested to Phuc Bui Diem Nguyen that she anglicised her name, because it sounded like an insult in English, comes to mind. Anyway, although the politics of names might be an interesting post let's get back to where I started.  I was doing one of my online italki sessions thi...

In the dialogues, in Spanish language text books, the characters all have names like Francisco Garcia and Maria Hernandez. It's true there are plenty of Marias and Franciscos in Spain. They are often disguised though. Many of the Marias are, for instance, Maria Luisa or Maria Dolores or Maria Mercedes so that they become Marisa, Lola or Merche whilst Francisco is Paco or Kiko. José Marias are Chemas. Hard going for the novice but not so different from the confusion that is Rob, Bob and Bobby or Chas, Charlie and Chuck. Christopher Marlowe was Kit after all - Kit Thompson anyone? It may be true that Garcia, Gonzalez, Cueva, Rodríguez and Lopez are the most common Spanish surnames nationwide but it seems to me that nobody, whose name you want to remember, is that easy. To give a random example the authors of the present Spanish Constitution were Gabriel Cisneros, Miguel Herrero y Rodríguez de Miñón, José Pedro Pérez Llorca, Manuel Fraga, Gregorio Peces-Barba, Miguel Roca Junye...