Playing the Gypsy

This may mean something more romantic and exciting in English than in Spanish. At least, the way I’ve decided to translate it. In Spanish, you might just consider it an ethnic slur. Were I to use the phrase “playing the gypsy” I might be referring to a wanderlust in action, and inability to tell you what language I’d try to learn tomorrow, or exactly how I might fund the trip. I would appear and disappear seasonally. This is after all what the “Roma” or the “Gitanes” do. They move through the countryside, working with the picking and harvesting seasons. What they don’t tell you in the name is that the locals make fun of them, and avoid them. They don’t even try to hide their distaste.

I’ve been taking a Spanish class to chill my travel eager bones, though evening classes, I find, are challenging to sit through. My professor brought up this phrase, translated as “playing the gypsy”, to explain how one character was, so to speak, trying to “pull one over” on another.

Here’s the catch, though. The phrase in Spanish is “jugar la roma”, which I suppose more accurately translates to “to play the Roma”. I laughed when he said it, loudly and inappropriately. Inappropriate, of course, because either no one found it funny, or no one got it (given my class, the latter is more likely true). I laughed in one of those ways where it’s so painful it’s funny. You know, to watch a society’s chauvinistic history reveal itself through its diction.

So one plays an ethnic group much like one plays a sports game, and what this really means is that when you engage in an activity designed to shaft someone, you are acting as a certain ethnicity would.

I was interested that my professor is from Mexico and uses this phrase, when “La Roma” are a distinctly European occurrence. I thought I’d look for the phrase online, but when I searched it in wordreference I found nothing and google only came up with stories about Rome’s soccer team playing Real Madrid. Perhaps it’s an old Spanish phrase not in use anymore, like the way my grandmother, as she grew older and regressed through her memories, once used a colloquialism for brazil nuts, learned in her early childhood, that involved words I can’t even say or write.

Really these crazy things are hidden in plain sight, in our myriad tongues. I’ve been working to avoid the word “gyp” when I search for synonyms for this Spanish phrase. Though it does not invoke the ethnic trope of Roma, it still derives from the idea that Gypsies are out to con you. The phrase “gyp” at the very least lets the speaker attach his or her own ethnic notions, rather than letting the language impose that in the conversation.

And, English. At five, who ever thought sitting “Indian-style” around the campfire wasn’t a kosher thing to do? I looked this one up and found that the rest of the world is just as perplexed as we are about what it means, and whether it’s okay to say. It turns out that while Merriam-Webster says the English “Indian-style” does come from the days when European explorers reported about this bizarre way the American natives had of sitting, many Eurasian languages also assign the posture to one group or another. Most actually call it “sitting Turkish”, while the most PC version seems to be “sitting like a tailor”. Check out the conversation.