Ligature

It's funny how much I've been thinking about how often it seems we lump things with very distinct differences together.

It started Wednesday while I was watching Modern Family. Sofía Vergara's character Gloria couldn't think of the animal, so she said it in Spanish: ardilla. Me speaking and knowing Spanish, I'd always known ardilla to mean "chipmunk", so when Gloria's son translated it as squirrel, it surprised me. Checking the RAE's dictionary, I found it to be both chipmunk and squirrel. I thought this: how can Spanish lump together two similar but *very* different mammals under the same word? They share a kingdom, phylum, class, order and family. Close enough, but they can't interbreed viably, they look different, act differently. How can that be?

I brought this up with one of my Colombian co-workers/friends - Alix - and it brought up many trains of thought.

How, for example, do Spanish-speakers principally, from my experience, call all Asians "chinos"? Or after 9-11, I was hearing a lot of the Cubans around me referring to Arabs universally as "talibanes".

Backing to the animal theme, I'd brought up how dissimilar squirrels and chipmunks are, and asked if you would lump lions and tigers together. The response was, of course, no, because they're different. We kind of do the same thing in English quite a bit, like with turtles and tortoises.

I suppose I'm more sensitive to meaning in Spanish since it's my adopted language and not my main language, or I suppose because I'm me.

But chipmunks aren't squirrels, damn it!