Driving Me Crazy (Part II)

Llanta or Llanto?

One thing which is common in Spanish and difficult for English speakers is the idea of the same words with two endings - one in o and the other in a - and two different meanings. This is a good example, as one of them means the tyre of a car and the other means tears. Get it wrong and you will get some funny looks, although to be fair the time my tyre blew out miles from anywhere I could have easily used the two words in the same sentence.

Pare

This means stop, and I believe that we didn’t cover it in my Spanish lessons. In fact, I know that we didn’t. The reason I know this is that the first time I heard the word was when a stern looking policeman said it to me one day when I was out driving casually. Taking it to be a friendly version of “drive safely and, hey, have a nice day” I waved back at him and kept on trundling along. The stern officer then decided to run after me and shout “pare” several times, with perhaps the odd expletive thrown in too. At this point I realised that that there had been a fatal gap in the content of my Spanish courses and decided to brake. Sadly I did this rather too sharply and the copper ran into the back of my car (I had only being doing about 10mph when I passed him). The disappointment on his face when he found my papers were in order was my only highlight of the day really.