I’m sitting with a few of my friends eating Mexican food, one of whom is my Brazilian friend. At one point in the conversation I feign mild exasperation with her and burst out with “¡Ay mujer!”, making sure that I throw the upside-down exclamation in there so she knows that I mean business. Then I belatedly remember that Spanish is as foreign to her as it is — well, as it is to me these days, really. “How do you say ‘woman’ in Portuguese?” I ask her.

“Mulher,” she tells me. It’s much more nasal to say than you’d think by looking at it. So being the culturally-sensitive guy that I am, I favor her with a mildly exasperated “¡Ay mulher!”, throwing the inverted punctuation in there even though I have no idea if that’s acceptable to do in Brazilian Portuguese or it’s just so Old World.

“Good!” she says, smiling encouragingly at my pronunciation. “You say this too?”

“Well,” I say, “sure.” I can’t speak for the Mexican people as a whole, but I’ve been known to use it now and again.

She turns back to her food. “You know, if you said that in my country, people would think you were gay.”

Duly noted. Obrigado, Dea.

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