Diplomacy Begins with the Tongue

      Kind of glad to see L.A.'s new Mayor Garcetti speaking Spanish while visiting Mexico and doing a pretty good job of it from most accounts.

       Of course he had some lapses, not being a native speaker.  In one fairly notable instance, he was trying to say "the social fabric," and his Spanish made it fabrica social.  Unfortunately, el tejido social would have been correct.  What the Mayor uttered translates as "the social manufacturing plant."

       Writing for the L.A. times today, reporter Richard Fausset said:  "If Garcetti had been speaking French on a diplomatic mission to Paris, he might have been harangued--or even hanged--for his errors.  But Mexicans tend not to be such purists, and they have built up decades of tolerance for visitors from El Norte mangling their mother tongue."