Tag Archives: humiliation

Spanish Names

Nationality: United States of America
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 04/25/2021
Primary Language: English

What is Spanish Names?

“This game is full of cultural appropriation but here we go: You can only play it with a new person, and you say ‘hey, let’s play Spanish names,’ and someone is in charge and they assign everyone a Spanish name. And the new person, you name them ‘Arted,’ and the other people, you name ‘Maria’ or ‘Rosa’ and stuff like that. And then you go around and you say “Eif” and then your name, so the person names Arted says ‘Eif Arted’ which is like ‘I farted.’ And then you go around and say it louder and louder and faster and faster until the poor new kid is yelling ‘I farted.’ (laughs) It’s totally not real Spanish.”

Where did you play it?

“(laughs) Hebrew School! At our very PC synagogue.”

Context:

My informant is my twin sister. She is Jewish, attended Los Angeles public school, and is currently a USC student. She attended Hebrew school from third grade through high school. This information was collected during a family zoom call where we were checking in with each other.

Analysis:

Spanish Names is a game where there is an obvious in-group and out-group. There are those who have played the game before and understand the joke, and then there is the one person who has never played and is unknowingly going to end up as the butt of the joke. It plays into young children’s senses of bathroom humor through fart jokes, plus it humiliates a new person through a made-up Spanish word places between stereotypical Spanish names. The entire game is a set up to embarrass a single person, which brings a lot of joy to those who are in the know throughout the entire game.

“He who smelt it, dealt it”

Nationality: Mexican-American
Age: 65
Occupation: Business Owner
Residence: Fullerton, Ca
Performance Date: 4/26/2012
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

“He who smelt it, dealt it.”

This saying is a comment in response to an accusation that one has passed gas, and is more or less a way of saying that the accuser is the guilty one and only looking to place the blame on someone else to avoid the embarrassment of owning up to it. This phrase is usually used when in groups of three or more, and usually entails someone smelling a foul odor and calling the offender out on it. My informant said that one of his brothers told him this phrase when he was younger, as well as the follow-up phrase that “whoever denied it, supplied it.” It’s basically a way of humiliating each other and making light of a natural bodily function that is otherwise unseemly.

Theoretically it could be labeled as a proverb in that it implies that whoever brings up an unspoken problem is likely at fault for it, and the same can  be said for anyone who denies having caused the problem. However, to this collector’s knowlege it doesn’t usually come up outside of the specific situation of passing gas.

 Annotated: This saying was used as a joke with a double meaning in season 2, episode 16 of South Park, in which the protagonists were trying to find who was to blame for the recent trend of telemarketers taking advantage of elderly people by selling over-priced jewelry. The gold jewelry would be given to their relatives, who would sell it to the pawn shops, who would then smelt it down to be remade into new jewelry to be sold again. The joke was that the smelters were at fault for the entire scheme, hence “he who smelt it dealt it.”