Visual Vocabulary: Jingo

Jingo: (derogatory) An extreme bellicose nationalist. As in:

“When the question of Spanish characters came up, the officer at school said no typewriter anywhere has characters beyond those needed for English. But it isn’t true. The one you sometimes leave on the dining-room table has them.”

“Those gringos. What jingoists.”

“That was the problem at school. You can’t get far on a story without the accents and eñe. You begin with Señor Villaseñor in the bath, reflecting on the experience of his years, but instead he is ‘en el bano, reflexionando en las experiencias de sus anos.’”

(Translation without the eñe: Senor Villasenor is in the bath, reflecting on the experiences of his anuses. Whoops! There’s a big difference between años and anos). 

This scene is from Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna. I loved it so much, I didn’t even bother writing my own sentence. Hooray for grammatical correctness in all languages! Yes, I am a nerd.

Visual Vocabulary is a project I created for myself in which I attempt to sear new words into my memory by illustrating them.