I´d like to introduce you to my Ball and Chain

I´ve enjoyed studying spanish this year. It´s really been a lot of fun, and I think that is one of the reasons that I have improved so much. One of my favorite things about spanish, because of conjugations of verbs and the close links that nouns sometimes have, you get words that are spelled exactly the same way but can mean comepletely different things. I feel like puns can be taken to a whole ´nother level, or have been (to the point where they´ve been integrated into the language).

Ex 1: Me siento

It could mean ¨I feel,¨ as in me siento triste, ¨I feel sad.¨ Or you could be saying, ¨I sit.¨ I guess the difference between those two would be obvious in a conversation, but whenever I hear some use it either way I just think in my head of the opposite. So if someone would say to me, ¨I feel sad.¨ I just think of that persone sitting sadly. Or the opposite, ¨I sit over there.¨ I think of them saying I feel over there and then them going over and proceding to feel everyone and everything in the general area like an E-ed out raver.

Ex 2: Casa

It most quickly brings to mind, house/home, but with its reflexive direct object, it also means He, she, or you (formal) marries. I get to wondering if the derivation of the word casa came from being the build in which married people (casados) lived. Maybe, maybe not.

Ex 3 (and my personal favorites): Esposas

For those who have taken maybe only a little bit of spanish, you could know that it means wives. But it also means handcuffs. I know that we have the saying back home of a wife and kids being like a ball and chain, but never have we made the leap to just start calling them, the ball and chain. I don´t think anybody would ever introduce their wife (unless among good friends and having a very understanding wife) as their ¨ball and chain.¨ One thing that should be noted on this is that it only matches on the plural. So esposa, one wife, is cool but esposas, man that´s just handcuffs. Of course, all this gets me to thinking of how we could possibly adapt this to english but it just doesn´t seem to come out right. For example, to say that my boss and I brought along our balls and chain (balls and chains? ball and chains? This is hard to figure, like is it passersby or passerbies) might not give the correct image of what I intend to say. Maybe this won´t work for English.

There are so many more of these things, and for a person so obsessed with puns (yeah, I know, I got a bad sense of humor), it makes for studying and learning spanish really fun(ny).