Today in my grammar class we were learning about sentence construction for giving advice. In order to practice, our teacher told us to get in groups and give 6 different pieces of advice to Zaptero, the Spanish Prime Minister on how he should deal with the economic crisis. [For those of you who haven't taken any Spanish classes, zapatero means cobbler/shoemaker] Anyway, each group had to go around and read out their 6 pieces of advice–most were silly (he should get a new job; he should talk to Obama; etc, etc) but the third group had some very interesting suggestions. They started out by saying there should be more rebajas (sales) and we all though it was a strange suggestion to give the PM but we were willing to let it slide. There second suggestion was that he should hire more employees and at this point everyone was genuinely confused. When they said that he should start selling socks in addition to shoes, we were all struggling to hold in our laughter. The group (there were 3 of them) was completely clueless that we were all talking about the PM and not a cobbler! The teacher was really gracious and admitted that while we were all talking about the PM, the economic crisis does affect everyone, including shoemakers.
I was seriously embarrassed to even be in the same class as these people. Even if they didn’t know who Zapatero was before coming to Spain, knowing the name of the leader of the country in which you are currently living is a rather important detail, at least in my humble opinion. But I’ll let you be the judge.
José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Spanish PM
vs.
a zapatero, ie: cobbler
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