Word: wising
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Washington politics may not be good at producing health-care reform, but it's great at creating catchy new lingo. Getting "Borked." "Hanging chads." "Lipsticks on pit bulls." The latest is "wise Latina," two words that have been repeated ad nauseam since the middle of May, when conservatives started flogging the text of a 2001 speech given by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor at the University of California, Berkeley. In that talk - on the subject of a Latino presence in the American judiciary - Sotomayor now famously said, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness...
...sure, the idea of a "wise Latina" is a new one to a lot of people. Before the Sotomayor speech was made available, finding the words wise Latina in articles of any sort was exceedingly rare. Latinas are frequently described as "fiery" or "caliente" or "curvy" - but rarely "wise." A cursory Nexis search reveals only a single book review, from 2000, of a sci-fi tome called The Fresco, in which a heroine who communes with aliens is described as the daughter of "a wise Latina lady and her salvage-yard husband." Clearly a page turner. (See Sonya Sotomayor...
...Wise Latinas may have gotten little air time in U.S. pop culture, but the archetype is an old one among Hispanics: the wizened old woman who serves as a storehouse of folk wisdom - and is occasionally blessed with healing powers. It is the character of solid-like-a-rock Big Mama in Gabriel García Márquez's short story Big Mama's Funerals. It is otherworldly Ultima in Rudolfo Anaya's Chicano lit classic Bless Me, Ultima. And on the telenovelas, it is the kindly older lady who knows who the father of the orphaned deaf-mute...
...July 14 hearing, the nominee explained that "wise Latina" was her attempt to play off a quote by retired justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who said that "both men and women were equally capable of being wise and fair judges." Sotomayor said that "my play fell flat. It was bad." But Sotomayor is just trying to ameliorate her critics without having to make them look... unwise. She has nothing to apologize for - and neither have other politicians and judicial nominees who have said the same thing in their own words...
...American in the United States. "We gotta know about John Wayne and Pedro Infante," he huffs. "We gotta know about Frank Sinatra and Agustin Lara. We gotta know about Oprah and Cristina." Update: We gotta know about the Jonas Brothers and RBD. In other words, we gotta be wise to the ways of more than one culture. (Watch TIME's video "Sonia Sotomayor: Bronx (and Baseball) Role Model...