Matthew Baldwin of The Morning News reports – or reported – that Spanish-speaking drivers have been getting out of drunk driving cases because of a deficiency in Spanish-language cards used by traffic cops:
bq. But the defense somehow got a copy of the Spanish language card that the officer read from, and noticed that the little squiggle was missing from above an n in the sentence: ¿Tiene veinteuno años? In English that literally translates to Do you have 21 years?in other words, this was just a routine question to make sure the guy was an adult.
This sounds apocryphal, but I can’t trace it at Snopes. But parts sound convincing:
bq. The best part is that the defense attorney cant even bring himself to say the word anus. Instead, he calls it the back region. Were going in front of a judge next week, and Im going to make a point of saying the word anus as many times as I can during the proceeding. I even got them to call the legal brief The Anus Motion, so he wont even be able to refer to it by title.
Here’s a warning for those interviewing and writing about Latinos.
(Via the Forensic Linguistics mailing list)
In the City of London ‘Magic Circle’ law firm I was at, one legal secretary typed for the lack of funds obtained every year: ‘nothing received per anum’. Her typo appeared in the firm’s monthly broadsheet which advised her to go to hospital and have ‘nil per mouth’.
sounds like a fairly feeble attempt to breathe new life into the oldest gag in the dictionary. if it was a genuine language card, it would have read “… veinte un años…”. it’s easy to drop a tilde (and there’s a movement in favour of dropping diacritics altogether), but including the final o in front of the noun is too unidiomatic to be anything but the invention of some lawyer who occasionally says hallo to the puerto rican maid
You assume it’s idiomatic persons who prepare these language cards?