Let’s talk fruit and veggies. I get mine just up the street at Frutería Miryan, where a week’s worth of produce — about half a kilo each of bananas, tangerines, pears and onions, a few avocados, some lettuce and garlic and eggs — normally costs me a little under ten Euros. That’s kind of amazing, especially since most of the goods are brought in fresh from regional farms. I think of the little flecks of chicken poop on the eggs (a hen’s parting shot, as it were) as my freshness guarantee. It occurs to me that the proprietor of Frutería Miryan, a stout, matter-of-fact young woman named Miryan, would probably be puzzled by the “eat local” movement back home in the States. That locally grown produce frequently costs more than produce shipped across oceans and continents, and is often only available one day a week, at a specially staged “farmer’s market,” would no doubt confound her. It certainly confounds me. Back home in South Carolina, shrimp pulled from local waters by local shrimpers tends to be more expensive, by a long shot, than shrimp imported from places like Thailand. I’m guessing this has something to do with economies of scale, all that, but it still seems backasswards.

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Lately much has been made of the “Mediterranean diet”: the olive oil, the fresh fish, the fruits and salads that, when combined with a penchant for walking instead of driving, keep most Mediterranean folk healthier than, say, most American folk. Here at Noted Abroad we feel compelled to mention a lesser known, particularly Andalusian element of the celebrated Mediterranean regimen. In addition to seafood paella, homemade gazpacho, and fresh-squeezed orange juice, Andalusians just love to eat, well, terminal consonants. Around here, adios is not pronounced “ah-dee-OSE”, but “ah-dee-OH.” An autobus is not an “au-toe-BOOS”; it’s an “au-toe-BOO.” Ayer is not “ah-YAIR”, but “ah-YAY.” Por favor is not “por fah-VORE”; it’s “po fah-VO.” Seems that when you’re hungry, you’re hungry, and with so many consonants available, why stop with food? Really it’s kind of amazing that obesity isn’t a major problem in Andalucía. Must be the olive oil.

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Today Noted Abroad begins to run in monthly installments, rather than weekly. We’re thinking that such an arrangement will provide your correspondent a breather as he goes about learning how to be married. Great idea, except that a writer never really takes a breather. However indolent he or she may appear, however shiftless, your typical writer is constantly observing, scrutinizing, and documenting life’s curiosities. Day after day we go about filling notebooks with assorted notes and observations, with overheard dialogue, story notions, and character sketches. This obsessive documenting of life and concocting of realities, often unsolicited and unpaid, can look a lot like a mental disorder. Obsessive-Documenting Disorder, we might call it. ODD. Certainly more than a few writers have found medication attractive, the only question being whether to administer the medicine to oneself or seek the help of a trained professional, e.g. a bartender.

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One of the nice things about dating a Spanish woman is that, unless she has been watching a lot of American reality TV, her English won’t be pocked all to hell with the word “like.” Like, problems with, like, subject-verb agreement are, like, way easier on the, like, ear than, like, a diarrheal deluge of, like, “like”s.  (All that faux-figurative language can be hard on a literary chap: so many similes, so little time.) Nor is a Spaniard liable to throw the word “literally” around as clumsily as native-English speakers tend to do these days. A Spanish ESL speaker normally won’t say something like this, for example: I literally died when I saw my final grade. If you literally died, you are, um, dead. One might hope all the faux-literal language is offsetting all the faux-figurative “like” language, but it doesn’t seem to work that way.

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They say that if you didn’t learn a given language in the cradle, the next best way to learn it is in the sack. If you really want to learn Polish, for example, date a Pole. Be this as it may, the conjugal bed should not be considered a language lab. It is first and foremost a conjugal bed, and there are much more interesting things to do in a conjugal bed than conjugate verbs.

In the bilingual boudoir it’s a good idea to maintain clear boundaries between things linguistic and things romantic. Without clear boundaries, life can get awkward. As an example, let’s say you’re engaged in a little pillow talk with your Spanish sweetheart, and you decide you’d like to compliment her in her own language, in Spanish. You’re thinking something along the lines of, In the light of the moon, my love, your face is angelic. If this sounds a bit cheesy, that’s because it is — in English. The nice thing about using a foreign language to flatter is that you can be a bit cheesy without feeling cheesy: the cheese is being filtered through another language; you don’t really process the cheese as cheese. The words just sound like, well, sounds*. The risk is that maybe you aren’t yet fluent enough to be making blandishments, cheesy or otherwise, in your sweetheart’s language. Mid-blandishment you may realize that you do not know the Spanish word for, say, angelic, and what might have been a melodious prelude to a night of delight instead becomes a linguistic trainwreck: En la luz de la luna, mi amor, tu cara es, umm—wait—I mean—espera—how—I mean—¿cómo se dice—umm—“angelic” en, umm, español?

Here one of two things will occur, neither of them exceptionally romantic:

a) Just as you don’t know the word for angelic in Spanish, your beloved does not recognize the word angelic in English, in which case she will then ask you, in Spanish, what you are trying to say about her face. You don’t know how to say what-you-are-trying-to-say-about-her-face in Spanish, that’s the whole problem, so someone will need to fetch the conjugal language dictionary from the den, which fetching will entail the finding and donning of clothes, the turning on of lights, and other practical endeavors. The result is roughly akin to a bedside iPod shuffling from Sade’s “By Your Side” to Rush’s “YYZ.”

or

b) Your sweetheart does recognize the English word angelic, and she informs you that in Spanish it’s angélica, pronounced “ahn-HAY-lee-ka.” You might now patch up your compliment, paste the mot juste in, try to salvage some semblance of a mood, but hey, why use a word when you can analyze the living hell out of it:

“Ah…angélica. Of course. Angelic, angélica. It’s a cognate.”

“Yes. Sí.”

“I suppose the masculine would be angélico, with an o.”

“Claro.”

“And the g is a soft g, not a strong, hockin’-a-loogie-here g — because it comes in the middle, not at the beginning. Right?”

At this point you’d just as well put on a pot of coffee and break out the whiteboard. Any ambience that may have been established by the light of the moon on an angelic face is surely shot beyond repair. In the future maybe you’ll remember to make sweet-talk with the language you learned back when you were still in the cradle, soiling yourself. Who knows? What sounds cheesy to you may sound exotic to her. In any case it will, presumably, cohere.

*There is a flipside to this phenomenon, a danger: it’s possible to cuss like a roofer in another language without processing the true weight of your cussing until a native knocks you upside the head for impudence.

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Charlie Geer is the author of the novel “Outbound: The Curious Secession of Latter-Day Charleston.” His work has appeared in Tin House, The Sun, Bloomsbury Magazine, and The Southern Review.