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.
A random conversation got me curious about the two phrases, and, wow: So “autistic person” is in use since autism-as-a-diagnosis was coined, and “person with autism” comes along a few decades later. It immediately catches on, they’re about equally popular by the late ’80s, and as discussion of autism steadily increases over the decades after that, both phrases get more common at roughly the same rate.
But then! In the mid-2000s, something shifts, The use of “autistic person” takes a sudden plunge. Opinion pieces are going around that explain how “person with autism” is the less-offensive term, and the conversation is taking it to heart.
And then, in the early 2010s, something shifts again. Collective wisdom decides that, actually, “autistic person” is fine? Maybe that’s the less-offensive term, even?
It shoots back up in popularity. By the late 2010s, they’re getting close to the same usage again.
There’s a similar dip-and-then-rise with the usage of “autistic people” as compared to “people with autism”, but the rise is even more dramatic. The term “autistic people” has been dramatically less popular since the ’90s, until it shoots upward to outpace “people with autism” by 2019: (Google’s data only goes up to 2019. Too bad, I’d be really curious to see what the lines do in the next 4 years.)
This fits my anecdotal experience — for a while people were enthusiastically promoting “people with autism” as the superior term, and now the same amount of enthusiasm is behind “autistic people” — but I wasn’t actually expecting the hard data to be so clear about it.
The arguments I remember were grammar-based. And it’s not like the basics of English grammar have changed.
Wonder what did?
(Bonus: there’s no similar pattern for “people with disabilities” versus “disabled people”. The “with” construction also had its original rise in popularity in the late ’80s, and use of both phrases has gone up and down at similar rates since then, with “people with disabilities” being consistently, moderately more popular. No sign of “disabled people” making a dramatic comeback.)
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?"
