Archive
“I Want More Ladies”?!?
Yesterday at church I learned a great lesson in speaking Spanish. Contextualization. My teachers have used this word a lot. Now I understand it. In church we were singing a worship song and in a rare occurrence I understood ALL the words, or thought I did.
Now, before I tell you the rest of the story I have to give you a quick Spanish lesson – dame is a conjugated verb that means “give me” and dame is also a noun that means “lady”. Ok, back to the story…so, up on the screen the following song lyrics appeared:
dame, dame, dame
mas de ti
quiero mas de ti
In my head I translated those words as, “lady, lady, lady, more of you, I want more of you”. These are great lyrics for a Lionel Richie love song from the 80’s, but, a little odd for a song intended to praise God. Very confused, and forgetting the duel meanings of dame, I turned to Erin and asked her, “What does dame mean?” After she gave me the correct answer I spent much of the next 30 minutes snickering at myself.
A quick review in contextualization would have revealed to me that the proper translation of the above lyrics is actually, “give me, give me, give me more of you, I want more of you”.
Now THAT makes sense. But, it was worth a good laugh and a great lesson that shall not be forgotten.
Posted on January 28, 2008