Saturday, July 08, 2006

This abuse of a preposition shall not stand

You may not know this about me, but I speak Spanish. Actually, most of you who read this have met me, so you probably did already know that. To give you an idea of how well I speak, I will say this: My accent is better than the President's but not as good as Salma Hayek's. I am also an amateur writer, but I take it seriously enough that I usually leave of the adjective and just say "writer," but I didn't want to mislead anybody. I haven't gotten paid yet, so I haven't turned pro. I can still compete in the NCAAs of writing. Which, I guess, is just regular college. I will write as if you have no knowledge of the Spanish language, so if this offends you, no me importa.

All of us have probably enjoyed (or at least eaten) chili con queso or carne con queso. Those translate to "chili with cheese" or "meat with cheese." (Chili is the same.) However, I have recently seen in two different places, the use of "con queso" without a noun with which the cheese is. Moe's Southwest Grill uses in their ads that are read repeatedly during Clemson baseball games the expression "the best con queso dip..." there is something at the end of that, but Moe's is a fast food restaurant, so whatever follows is probably a lie. Jason Whitlock, a writer for espn.com, also made a reference to con queso dip. (If you really want, I can try to figure out where, but after two weeks, you need to be an espn insider to read it, and I'm pretty sure it's been two weeks.) You can't have con queso dip. You have to have something con queso. If not, it's just queso. ¡Díos mio! How hard is that?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Im surprised you made it through that post without mentioning "with au jus sauce."

Engineer Sighted said...

I haven't heard that recently, because I can't afford to eat at Quizno's.

mlo said...

el queso es viejo y moldy.

and "meet"?!@#!? nice work, [insert adjective here] writer. ;P

Engineer Sighted said...

Ha ha ha ha, I'm a jackass.