Yesterday my parents and I went to an upscale Mexican restaurant, which blessedly broke the chain of indistinguishable enchilada-and-burrito shacks metastasizing throughout Denver. But this restaurant was the exception that proves the rule: as soon as the white tablecloths and red wine come out, the waiters and busboys drawn from the owner’s 25 teenage cousins, who are almost capable of growing a single mustache among the lot of them and who seem so intrinsic to the experience of the Mexican restaurant, immediately disappear. Actually, I kind of missed those guys. I didn’t even get to hear incomprehensible and barbaric Mexicali slang being hurled listlessly back and forth over the heads of the uncomprehending gringos, who naturally sometimes get intentionally or incidentally tarred by it en route. This is why I don’t agree with people that think that Spanish and English are just going to merge together seamlessly into one big homogeneous mass. Like in medieval England, where the all the farm animals had Germanic names, whereas the meat and other food delicacies were in French, even if they do ultimately create a combined polyglot I suspect English and Spanish will remain more neighbors than sexual partners, rubbing against each other but monopolizing different areas and regions of life, with English confining its influence to things like flowers, financial chicanery and the more esoteric sorts of sexual degeneracy, while Spanish dominates the realms of cleaning supplies, weed whackers and domestic abuse.