My daughter is gifted. She is being raised bilingual. We live in Miami were the school system accepts bilingualism as a fact. Her father is Cuban. In his house, the family speaks Spanish. At my house, we use English (she objects to my second-hand Spanish that doesn’t sound quite right to her—for some reason this makes me laugh).
I love the little grammatical errors that occur when people shift back and forth between languages. I am really the last person you want to practice your English with if you want stringent feedback on your linguistic faux pas. I let too much slide. Eventually, I may get around to telling you how “we say it in America,” but I am certainly not going to stop every conversation to point it out. Like I said, I enjoy the grammatical errors. It opens new doors to understanding.
My daughter has a habit of saying “throw a picture” instead of saying “take a picture.” It is a literal translation of what she has learned at her father’s house: “tira una foto.” What an interesting image. I once wrote a poem called “Pressed Flowers” in response to a photo prompt. The poem associated a photograph with memories frozen in time, like flowers pressed between the pages of a book.
My daughter’s grammatical error opened up a new way of viewing photographs. It was not something that you took, a lost moment that you stole and hid away. A picture was something you threw! Throwing implies there will be someone else out there to catch it. It wasn’t a private experience, it was a shared experience.
Someday, I will tell her that we don’t actually say “throw a picture” in English, but for now, I am enjoying this little linguistic discrepancy.
