Hola.  Who decided we need to be directed to where to bring our returns in the mega-hardware-marts in Spanish?  Every sign in the two major home improvement chains down the streets from Either of We’s houses is bilingual.  The only problem is the second language isn’t the predominant one spoken here.  We live in a part of the country where the only people who speak Spanish are the high schoolers taking it for their language requirement.  And of those who do speak more than one language, English is still 100% the first choice although there are a few who specialize in bar talk in Polish, German, and Italian.

Now we don’t mean to be uncaring to Spanish speakers across the country, but something strange is going on and it involves Español.  She of we recently got a new television set.  She set it up according to the detailed instructions that come with televisions nowadays.  You know, that paper packed just under the box top that opens to a 5 foot by 7 foot poster covered with pictograms of the TV and all of the various components one might attach to the TV accompanied by the copyright in 18 languages in a font so small it would never be possible with movable type.  Do you remember when the only instructions for a TV were: 1. plug it in, 2. turn it on?  But we digress.  After several hours and two bottles of wine the set was plugged in and turned on.  Everything seemed to work.  Except…

Except every time she goes to the high definition version of ABC she gets Spanish subtitles.  Closed captioning is not turned on.  We’ve checked.  No default for that channel, no special instruction for that channel.  They just show up.  But only on that channel.  Not that network because the regular non high definition version of the same network doesn’t have them on screen.  Just the high def version.  Just that channel.  Just one out of 800.  And in Spanish!

Allow us to add to the peculiarities of this report.  Friends of ours have a television set that they have had for years.  And for years, one particular show on one particularly network (a weekly live sports cast during the football season on Monday nights) has appeared on their television with Spanish voiceovers.  Only that show.  Only that station.  Only that television.  We really aren’t making this up.  We can call them over to confirm this idiosyncrasy.  They tried different rooms.  They tried different cables.  They even moved.  (Actually they didn’t move because of the television set but it made a dramatic transition, don’t you think?)  Then they moved, brought the set with them, set it up again, but the Spanish speaking commentators stayed away.  Nobody ever found out why.  To be honest, nobody ever looked for why.  They were just happy they could watch football and understand the juego por juego.

Too strange to be true?  Not at all.   Televisions and radios have long picked up spurious signals and played havoc with the one that the viewer or listener was expecting.  He of We had a radio that picked up an AM signal from a city some 900 miles away while seemingly tuned to a station on the FM band.  The strange thing is that it’s all in Spanish. 

Those who should know such things (we’re not sure why they should but they do) say that a little over 10% of the population of the United States speaks Spanish as their primary language and that half of them speak only Spanish or one of several Spanish dialects.  We find it a little odd over 5% of the country cannot speak the official language but that’s a different blog.  What we find stranger is that for the sake of 5% of the country there are small electronics that have taken it upon them to speak and spell in Spanish, dialect unknown.   

Perhaps a bit more unsettling is that all throughout the country, regardless of the concentration of language spoken, there are major retail chains, clearly not wanting to miss a sell to anybody, that have spent millions on signs directing shoppers where to go to find a battery operated destornillador.   Even where the only Spanish speakers only speak it Monday through Friday during Period 3 until the end of this semester. 

We think that’s a lot of duplication of effort that the stockholders might want to look into.  Three hundred million people can find their destornillador on the strength of the English half of the sign alone.  Think of all the paper we would save if we cut those signs in half.      

Now, that’s what we think.  Really.  How ‘bout you?