Dead BB and other castellano/english miscommunications

Dead BB

I was speaking with a group of people last week and we were talking about miscommunication and if technology often confuses real communication.  One person spoke up and offered a great example of just such a case.  His friend Diego and he were in the hospital waiting for the delivery of his friend’s first-born son.  Diego was nervous and fidgeting in the waiting area.  He was receiving texts, emails, facebook updates, and tweets about the arrival of his baby.  As luck would have it, such a onslaught of communication somehow disabled his blackberry.  It froze and he had to reset it time and time again.  After half an hour of trying to solve the problem, he finally gave up and wrote: BB muerte (keep in mind this story is in Spanish).  We assume from the context that BB = BlackBerry, and we are so accustomed to saying “dead” when we run out of batteries that we don’t think twice about the literal meaning of the word.  It could be because it’s just much easier to say “dead” than “not working”.  The comedian Demetri Martin has shed light on this subject and added, “If you’re a battery you’re either working or you’re dead, it’s a shit life”.

Well, in Spanish the abbreviation BB also means bebe or baby.  Diego wrote “bebe muerte” or baby dead.  This immediately freaked his father out and he began calling everyone and asking about his grandson.  Eventually he found out about the double meaning and laughed about the scare.  But I think the point is that we shouldn’t get accustomed to using abbreviations or shorthand, and should question if fad words are the most effective way of communicating: especially within English and Spanish.  I’m in no way instigating a regression to previous ways of communicating, I’m simply instigating a reevaluation of generally accepted terms when communicating between the two languages.

Examples:

ack – acknowledge (english)

     ¡Que asco! (spanish)

ALU – arithmetic logic unit (english)

     A Lucia twitter (spanish)

cos – cosine (english)

     “cos” or because (spanish)

Eu – Euler number (english)

     Eulalia (spanish)

fpm – feet per minute (english)

     fotos por mail (spanish)

gal – gallon (english)

     galán (spanish)

qt – quart (english)

     ¿qué tal? (spanish)

IR – infrared (english)

     GO! (spanish)

ROM – read-only memory (english)

     Rolingas o metal (spanish)

RGB – red green blue (english)

     Re garca boludo (spanish)

RI – ring indicator (english)

     Re In o muy copado (spanish)

SIP – single inline package (english)

     Yes (spanglish)

sin – sine (english)

     – or without (spanish)

TB – terabyte (english)

     Todo bien (spanish)

tan – tangent (english)

     soooo (spanglish)

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