Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Jota vs Joto

Well today was a learning experience. We are doing multicultural night and I am teaching my kids how to basque dance. It's going well...they are having fun I am having fun...that was until today. The name of the dance is the Jota...go ahead if you see where this is going and challenge me. Let me preface this with the fact that Dave made fun of me last summer telling me that was a bad word or the word for gay or faggot (and I hate that word) in Spanish...I think he is being funny...I am wrong. Today I name the dance again and about 7 kids all spanish speaking students bust up laughing. I realize the problem I have and tell them that we will talk at recess. I stress the point that if they tell the rest of the class we just aren't going to learn the dance and we will be done. I mean it's not a bad word if it means gay but it if it is slang for fag, then it sounds like I am calling my kids fags all day...just what I need.

So I immediate inform my principal and VP in case any disgruntled parents should call. I doubt they will but that would be my luck. So we looked it up in the spanish dictionary and it means the letter j or a dance. Then we looked it up on wikipedia and it means a spanish dance or music or some kind of scandinavian sawerkraut! Yeah...THEN my VP looks it up on urbandictionary.com and if you haven't ever visited this dumb site you should. As annoying as it is some of the words they have on there...it's actually pretty funny. So on that site a joto or a jota is the mexican slang for a homosexual male or a faggot...hello not my problem that my 8 year old kids have their minds in the gutter!!!!

Any parents that want to challenge me can bring it...I have the spanish dictionary and wikipedia to back me up!!!

1 comment:

Lindz said...

You're right! I was a Spanish major and lived in Spain for over a year... Joto means jack (as in a jack in the deck of cards) and is also used as "fag." Jota is not used in the same way - and no you can't add an a to make it a feminine fag, doesn't work that way. Stick to your guns, girl!