Word: cleaners
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...hotel employee whose identification tag said he was Kresimir Skoko got on an elevator, dragging an enormous vacuum cleaner. At the next floor, a moist young woman fresh out of Lake Michigan got on with two youthful sports who struggled to settle their bicycles around Skoko's machine. The athletes had the look of the superfit, the whites of their eyes blue white, calves plumped out like loving cups, dazzling teeth set in gums that probably will never know the heartbreak of gingivitis. Skoko had the look of a man grown weary with this age, and the knit...
...elevator door opened at the sixth floor and the two with bikes wrestled to get them over the vacuum cleaner and into the corridor...
...says. "You can be more daring." Kathryn Dallam, a secretary at IBM, rationalizes the $12 monthly cost of her Pronto service, claiming that home banking saves her $20 a month in stamps, envelopes and transportation costs. And Investment Banker Stodder blames himself, not the system, for electronically sending his cleaner $580 instead of the $55 for which he was billed. Says he: "I'm just letting it ride by sending clothes over there to be cleaned until the credit is used...
Some Spanglish sentences are essentially English with a couple of Spanish words thrown in ("Do you have cold cerveza?"). Others are basically Spanish in structure with Hispanicized words borrowed from English ("Donde esta el vacuum cleaner?"). The confluence of the two languages is also producing new verb forms that are not found in any textbook. "Quieres monkear?" is one way of saying "Want to hang out?" Borrowed from the slang infinitive "to monkey around," the Spanglish verb monkear is used in the same way as truckear, which refers to working around trucks, shopear (i.e., at the market) and mopear...
Reina came from El Salvador because of "horrible things." She says simply, "I got scared." When she finally reached Los Angeles and found a job as a housekeeper at $125 a week, her new employer pointed to the vacuum cleaner. Vacuum cleaner? Reina, 24, had never seen such a thing before. "She gave me a maid book and a dictionary," says Reina, who now writes down and looks up every new word she hears. "That's how I learn English. I don't have time to go to school, but when I don't speak English, I feel stupid...