A Spanish Lesson

Before we moved to Mexico, Laurel and I had been enrolled in an advanced level Spanish class in Vermont, so we naturally assumed fluency would be a small additional step once we were surrounded by Spanish-speaking neighbors. Now that we've lived here two and a half years, that ultimate goal of fluency seems farther away than ever. The more we learn, the more we realize we don't know.

There's an expression people use here that caught my fancy. It is used whenever someone is explaining their failure to remember something. For the last couple years I have misheard it as semi olvidé, which I understood to mean "I halfway forgot." I liked the way it seemed to minimize personal responsibility, with the implicit claim that one's memory was only partly defective. It especially appealed to me when the speaker included the adverb completamente, as in "I halfway forgot completely."

I was joking about this expression the other day with our neighbor Chayo, who patiently explained that I had it all wrong. I tried weakly arguing for my version, holding out for the prefix semi. Chayo admitted the prefix has a use; she sells 2% milk in her store that is semidescremada, or "halfway uncreamed." But she wouldn't budge on the phrase in question. And who am I to argue with an expert in the Spanish language?

It turns out there is no halfway about it. The expression I had misunderstood for so long is really se me olvidó, which means "it forgot itself to me." Now that I'm getting used to saying it correctly, I've decided I like it even better than my other version. Before I was halfway responsible for forgetting something, but now, when something forgets itself to me, I am completamente innocent.