
…was my Henry Higgins, though the process was inverse; he took a well-spoken person (in English) and turned me into a street urchin (in Spanish). When I understood just how informal my Spanish was, I started reading and cleaning up my vocabulary. In Buenos Aires, a mess is a quilombo, which I later learned referred to brothels. I had always assumed this was just the appropriate word for a complicated circumstance. Al pedo was a rude way of saying sin sentido. I began to pick and c…