While I was serv­ing in the Chile Osorno mis­sion I heard a story (3rd party) about a sis­ter mis­sion­ary else­where in the mis­sion who really butchered the Span­ish lan­guage. You see, there are cer­tain words that sound sim­i­lar and mean the same thing between Eng­lish and Span­ish. How­ever, there are other words that sound the same and mean some­thing totally different.

As the story goes, one new sis­ter mis­sion­ary was asked to give her tes­ti­mony in a new area some­where in south­ern Chile. Because her Span­ish speak­ing skills were not that great she was very ner­vous. She approached the podium and after intro­duc­ing her­self she said, “estoy muy emberasada” (I am very emberassed). Then she pointed to the bishop and said, “and it’s his fault”. Unfor­tu­nately, in Span­ish the phrase “estoy muy emberasada” means “I am very preg­nant”. The con­gre­ga­tion got a great laugh out of that one.

I had a sim­i­lar yet less spec­tac­u­lar expe­ri­ence myself. In Chilean Span­ish Cara­binero means Police­man and caballo (cabayo) means horse. One day while I was walk­ing through a park I passed a police­man and politely said, “hola caballo” (hello horse). I couldn’t under­stand what the dirty look was all about until my com­pan­ion explained it to me later.