Sorry, people who don’t speak Spanish will not be able to understand this but I just have to share because it is too precious. In the final exam, a student writes:
A causa de quemar iglesias, los republicanos perdieron mucha polla.
It took me a while of sitting there feeling stunned before I realized that “mucha polla” was the way student transcribed “mucho apoyo” from my lecture.
Clarissa's Blog 
Oh, students! They always write such entertaining things!
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la polla = the penis
los huevos, los cojones= the testicles
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Well, obviously they shouldn’t have burned the church in the first place if all of their chickens were inside of it!
(I’m surprised by how well I understood that sentence, actually: the only word I really needed to look-up was “quemar”).
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This is even funnier than you think because in Spain “la polla” is a way of referring to male genitals. So the Republicans really suffered there. 🙂 🙂
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Oh. Sorry for making you explain the joke.
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No, no, this is Spanish slang, how can anybody be expected to know?
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Hey Clarissa. I’m in a little bit of a dilemma with my mother.
Recently, my family has fallen under hard times again and we will be forced to leave our home before January of next month. I was recently taken off SSI benefits because even though I have autism, they’ve determined from my latest high school records and such that I’m able to function normally enough to the point where such a diagnosis doesn’t affect me, which is 100% true. Now my mom wants me reevaluated and wants me to lie to the doctor basically saying that I can’t dress myself and all these false embellishments and lies. I know it’s very dishonest and I’ve said no many many times but to no avail. I’m 18, so I’m basically a legal adult and I don’t know why my words are having no effect or authority on this matter. I have no interest in robbing from the system because I know there are people out there who need the money more than I could ever need it. What should I do?
I’m also highly opposed to this because it’s going to look very bad upon my own ethnicity and people if such fraud is committed and that’s why my mom doesn’t seem to understand. My sister, a college senior and a political science major is on food stamps and working a crappy 10 dollar an hour job at a bank and has made very poor financial choices herself. I’m afraid that even if I agree to all of this that my family will continue to go down the path of getting in trouble financially and therefore, this could affect how much I would be able to work at a job and how dependent I would need to be on that sort of check.
As you can tell, honest is an essential part of my own individualistic, self-reliant character.
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Oh, Roberto. I’m so so very sorry that you have to be going through this. You are a very good person and it is very sad that you have to be going through this. I know very well that for an autistic lying and going against one’s core beliefs in this way is shattering. What are your plans right now? Are you going to be able to live on your own any time soon?
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Actually, I’m starting college next month after taking a semester long sabbatical of what I wanted to major in college along with reading countless economic articles and books. I’m going into the electrical engineering program at a local state school, so I won’t be living at home for too much longer.
Whatever the outcome will be, I am going to do all I can to remain honest and calm during the reevaluation even if it means not qualifying for benefits I’m not entitled to. It’s going to cause disappointment in my mom as I’ve told her many times that there are other ways and solutions to these problems, like getting rid of any service that we don’t need and selling valuables that aren’t needed to generate some income. I had even been offered several jobs, but my parents wouldn’t even let me start a job at one of those companies because they didn’t want me using my mother’s car as a means of transportation. My father is going up to New York and if it hadn’t been for this reevaluation nonsense, I probably would have been able to go. I will see if I can negotiate something so that might be possible.
I received a good piece of advice once and that despite the love I have for my family, whatever decision I make should be for myself and raising my own living standards rather than encouraging other people to become parasites and not attempt to work and move up in society. This is the trap that my sister and mother have fallen into. They really are not independent and I’m trying to save myself from suffering from their bad decisions such as my sister buying an expensive used car that she barely had the means to pay for that could potentially destroy her credit and such.
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Roberto: I understand your situation better than you can imagine. This is an important lesson you are learning pretty early in life. What I have learned is that trying to carry other adult healthy people financially is a great disservice you can do both to them and to yourself. It might seem to solve the immediate issue but it creates a much greater problem later on in life. The best and the kindest thing you can do for yourself and for your family members is to take care of yourself, work out your own guiding principles, follow them, and become a happy fulfilled person. The role of a savior who sacrifices himself for others is not a good role. It is ultimately quite exploitative and it turns any relationship into a very unhealthy miserable one.
Somebody needs to be an adult in this situation and if that has got to be the 18-year-old Roberto, then it has to be it. I’m sure you will do very well in life because you started figuring this out early.
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One of my Spanish teachers told us that he had a woman in his class who kept writing “Me gusta arroz con polla” on essays, even after he corrected her and explained what it meant…
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Well, there is always a possibility that she is sexually adventurous. 🙂 🙂
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Weel, actually the word “polla” also means female chicken and is sometimes used speaking about special recipies (since you normally use chicked nevermind the gender, right?)… it’s just that the other menaning is way more used.
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¡Qué grande! I would have never been able to guess the actual meaning of such a sentence…
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Bastardized translation:
I read that as ” Because of the Republicans burn church, they will lose much chicken” which made me chuckle. I don’t know Spanish, I just remembered randomly that “Iglesias” means church and that “polla” looked like “pollo” which I remember from reading menus. “perdieron” looks a lot like the future version of “perdre” in French.
@Roberto
The act of maintaining the fakery required to get an SSI check will cause your skills to atrophy so much that you won’t be able to get a job when you need to. Do your parents have ANY FUCKING IDEA how difficult it is to be offered a job and keep it, especially if you’re on the spectrum and they unofficially require some “people person”: nonsense? Especially if it’s not some retail or similar underemployment. I personally want to shake your parents.
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