I have now tracked down a copy of the 1st edition, from 1992!
All of the “dónde…?” questions (five of them, across three sample dialogues) are the same. And the vocabulary list at the end of the booklet confirms “biblioteca” is not in here.
There was a moment when I wondered if Barron’s didn’t change anything at all, just reused exactly the same text in every re-release over the decades. Then I noticed, the restaurant recommendation in Dialogue 4.a is different. (Did they lose a sponsorship deal with the place from the 1992 version?)
They also updated the dialogues that have references to currency. The letter from 4.b that cost 75 pesetas in 1992, it’s 1.36 euros in 2004.
But yeah, as far as las bibliotecas go, it’s a dead end.
There are a bunch of other “learn Spanish” cassette tapes by different companies on eBay. Way too many for me to buy and inspect them all. I was willing to drop $20 to indulge this curiosity; I’m not blowing $200 on it. So this may be the end of the story.
(If you have any of these tapes on hand, and can confirm/deny whether your brand has the biblioteca line, please comment and let me know!)
There are a couple of “dónde…?” questions, as transcribed in the booklet, but none of them deal with las bibliotecas:
That said, there’s still an open possibility the line was in the first edition, then the editors replaced it for the 2nd or 3rd edition, after they realized it had become a big joke.
Unfortunately, my library doesn’t have the earlier editions.
Wrote a fic chapter a while back that used “dónde está la biblioteca” as the classic example of “a simple phrase that a character with limited Spanish-fluency can handle.”
A commenter asked if it was a reference to Deadpool…and, no, it’s much older than that. Decades older. It was a meme before internet memes were a thing!
…Which is probably why it’s so hard to trace. KnowYourMeme only documents it as a joke from a 2009 episode of Community, and it wasn’t invented by Community, either.
I’ve found a couple of pre-2009 examples online. Dodgeball: A True Underdog Storyis a film from 2004…never seen the whole thing, but I’m pretty sure this is our hero trying to intimidate his business rival with what a worldly big-shot he is:
“Dónde está la biblioteca, Pedro?…We’re opening up a new Globo Gym in Mexico City, I’ve been boning up on my Spanish.”
Going back farther, there’s Bedazzled, from 2000, when the hero gets magically awoken in a world where he’s a suave Latino Spanish-speaker.
He flexes his new skills with several Intro-to-Spanish phrases: “[If Mrs. Klein my Spanish teacher could hear this…] Hola Juan! Hola Esteban! Dónde está la biblioteca? [This is the home of my aunt. No thank you, I’m allergic to shellfish.]”
And this other comment says it’s in a 1970s album by Steve Martin. I have now watched/listened to multiple Steve Martin bits that involve non-English languages, and no sign of las bibliotecas
…And finding any information about them has been so hard. Searching Youtube and the broader Internet buried me in a landslide of people shilling their current Spanish-language courses, half of them bot-generated. The title’s very generic. I didn’t have any other details to narrow it down.
Thank goodness for the Library of Congress, because I’m guessing this nice bare-bones listing is it. (The date is 2004, but it’s the 3rd edition.)
Publisher: Barron’s. Author: William W. Lawton.
I can’t find this digitized anywhere either. And I don’t exactly have a cassette player these days. But — the cassettes come with a little booklet, with the whole script written out.
Gonna see if I can get my hands on one. It’ll be a few weeks at least. Hopefully I turn up something that makes for a good update post.
In the meantime, if anybody reading this already has a copy…or if you have relevant links for any of the biblioteca references that aren’t here already…drop a comment, let me know.
2016: “In a nondescript building in West Roxbury, over 1 million of Boston’s most precious artifacts sit untouched in rows of white, acid-free boxes. There are cannonballs from the 18th century, clay pipes embellished with the British crown, 17th century chamberpots, perfectly intact Chinese porcelain plates, and 7,500-year-old Native American spearheads. Most of the artifacts (about two-thirds) have never been properly sorted.”
February 2021: “Nastaʿlīq, after all, is a nightmare to code. It moves right to left, like all Arabic scripts, but also slopes downward: the longer the word, the steeper the slope. The shape of each letter changes, depending on the letter that comes before and after; in a 39-letter alphabet, there are thousands of permutations.” The quest to adapt Urdu into functional fonts that actually convey the script.
August 2023: “The design was no longer ad hoc for a specific project, said Campbell. “It was letter by letter, so we could have this new font to use at our discretion for anything.” Representing a language in a typeface is a communal effort. For four years, Warburton and the Musqueam language department passed suggestions to Tiro Typeworks, a digital type foundry, to design.”
August 7: “Call it the Hollywood-labor-organizing version of Avengers Assemble! On the heels of more than a year’s worth of damning disclosures around Marvel Studios’ systematic overworking and underpayment of visual-effects workers on its blockbuster movies and streaming series, VFX crews at Marvel have finally petitioned to demand union recognition from the studio.”
"Pretty low-stakes, but I learned about The Beatles before I learned about, you know, actual beetles, and I was convinced my science book had spelled beetle wrong." Funny misconceptions you had as a kid.
Various experiences of the TETRIS effect. "The funnier one was after a lot of Witcher I kept seeing bushes and getting the urge to check if they were a rare herb I needed for alchemy."
Conviction arcs. "What are some series where a character (a) does genuinely bad things that they should face consequences for, but (b) is supposed to be broadly sympathetic and redeemable, and (c) spends time in prison as part of their restitution?"
Matriarchy worldbuilding. ("Would gender stereotypes be different in a matriarchy? How so? What are some new ones that might pop up that seem foreign and unfamiliar to current gender stereotypes in our world?" Etc.)
Hard hitting lines. (To nobody's surprise, a disproportionate number are from Bojack Horseman. But there's a lot of good stuff in here.)
"How do you experience horniness? Because the Horny Void thread has me curious. Do you get tingles? Thumps? Heaviness? Lightness? Hypersensitivity? Lightheadedness, or clarity, or bonelessness or a sudden vigor?"
...and now, without further ado, queer & trans links from across multiple centuries. The language and the terms change, but the people have always been here.
Haven't been saving as many thoughtful discussion threads from FFA for a while. Here are the ones I've pulled over the past...wow, 2 years? Didn't realize it had been that slow.
(To be fair, I'm still enjoying meme for reasons that are less link-able. Wank rubbernecking, mostly. And "in spite of never having watched a single episode of the show, deciding how I feel about the Supernatural finale.")
"How are names formed in your culture? What do creators need to keep in mind when coming up with accurate names? Are there any memorable examples, good or bad?"
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