Blended Spanish.

A very interesting NY Times piece by Elda Cantú (archived): I have been speaking Spanish for over 40 years, and practically every day I learn a new word, an unfamiliar meaning or a new slang term. I grew up on the border between Mexico and Texas, where a gallon container is called a yoga — after the English jug, the name given to milk containers on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande. As a graduate student, I spent a few months among Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in New York, perreando at sweaty parties and soaking up the lyrics of what we’d now call classic reggaeton. For nearly a decade, I worked as a journalist in South America. I married a Peruvian colleague, and even though we have lived in Mexico City for many years, the Spanish spoken in our home mixes vocabulary from our backgrounds: cuddling is apapacharse, a very Mexican word with Nahuatl roots, but scolding is the Peruvian resondrar. Chiles are called ajíes, as they are in Peru, but if we find them too spicy, we say nos…