Spanglish and Nuyoricanspeak - (good read)

EARLIER this year, I was delighted when sheetrockero came up in my word-hunting. A sheetrockero, I discovered, is somebody who puts drywall or sheetrock on the wooden frames of new buildings. It’s straightforward Spanglish: the English sheetrock plus the Spanish -ero suffix, indicating a person who undertakes a task or profession.

Research uncovered a good dozen books on Amazon.com featuring similar “construction Spanish”. Even more pleasing was that one of them, Terry Eddy’s and Alberto Herrera’s Learning Construction Spanglish, includes a conjugation chart for shiroquear, a Spanglish verb for “to sheetrock (shiroque); to hang drywall”.

But a couple of weeks later, in the National Review I read something that made me wonder. The writer, Jay Nordinger, was concerned about “construction Spanish” and bilingualism and the “Spanish-preservation rackets”. It didn’t sound good. I wondered if I should be worried, too. Is delighting in the words sheetrockero and shiroquear akin to standing on the deck of the Titanic and saying, “Ooh! Pretty iceberg!”? “*

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