So I was reading this Mexican porn comic book that Tamara picked up at Hidalgo Grocery. To learn vocabulary, of course.

See, I allegedly speak a number of languages, but when it comes down to nitty-gritty street-level communication, I suck. This is because I’ve learned all of them in the classroom, and very little on the streets, and never, ever between the sheets. Oh, to have the filthy Syrian colloquial mouth of Adrienne, to have the wisdom of Maureen, who started Arabic tutoring with the specific goal of learning how to gossip, or even just to have the extemporizing talent of Tamara, who can entertain a party with a bawdy sentence memorized from the Italian phrasebook.

Instead. I’ve busied myself with verb conjugations and nuances of the subjunctive. I only happen to know that kut means “cunt” in Dutch because it’s printed in the newspaper, often in the compound word kuttelikkertje, which is the word for a lap dog. Generally, I conduct myself with utter decorum and grammatical propriety in Arabic, French, and Dutch–but that also means I don’t talk nearly as much as I’d like to.

A few years ago, I vowed it would be different with Spanish. It’s the only language I feel I have a cultural edge with, some innate instinct for, having grown up in New Mexico, where all my grade-school teachers spoke Spanish and it was a required class in sixth grade.

But I didn’t learn crucial words for genitales there, of course, nor did I learn them in Instituto Cervantes classes in Cairo, or in chipper expat immersion courses in Merida, or any of the other places I’ve studied Spanish over the years.

It’s too late for me to have a passionate fling with the guy who brings the umbrella drinks at the Tulum resort, or a coffee-break canoodle with the hot manager at Pret a Manger.

So that’s why I’m reading Mexican porn comics. And the reason I’m telling you this on my food-ish blog is that these are the words I learned today:

papayita: Imagine this fruit cut in half…
chorizo: Sausage. Duh.
aguacates maduros: Not a slang term per se, but a metaphor for the state of the aroused husband’s testicles: like “ripe avocados”

Hot, no? Grocery shopping in Mexico will never be the same…