Go, Banana!

Banana (a.k.a. little sister Vanessa) is in Lille this week visiting the French fam, so I headed up on Sunday to hang out a bit and test some new teasing material before putting it to use in San Francisco. Banana is doing well; we talked a lot about Aiden Doggie, going grey early, Portland, use of the Alexanderpool beach house and boys (not necessarily in that order).

All of that was interesting, but I'm sure that many of you would probably be more interested to learn how Vanessa ended up with the nickname "Banana". Well, it's all got to do with the Guatemalans, you see. Not because Guatemala is a banana republic, although that would be a good guess and partial credit would be awarded. No, the tale begins with Anna, our housekeeper/babysitter for several years when we lived in Monroe. How Anna settled in Monroe after immigrating from Guatemala is an entirely different story that can be summed up with the words "clerical error".

Not having lived in the US for long before working for us, Anna had a strong accent when she spoke English. Not surprisingly, she had a rather tough time with our family name, which poses a number of problems for native Hispanics. V's are particularly troublesome, since the Spanish "v" is pronounced like the "b" in "boy". Linguistic experts disagree on the origin of this quirk, but the prevailing theory is that the Spanish royal family in the Middle Ages suffered from chronic head colds, and their courtiers decided that they would just ape their style of pronunciation rather than let on that anything was wrong. Don't even ask about the Castiglian lisp or the origins of the tilda.

As a result of Anna's accent, my mother was referred to as "Mrs. Bandrio", and Vanessa became "Banessa". That probably wouldn't have resulted in fruity nomenclature, however, if it weren't for Anna's daughter, Diana. Diana had been born in the US, and Anna wanted to ensure that her daughter learned to speak English. She therefore imposed an English-only household, even though the closest Diana came to a native English speaker before the age of five was watching Bob Barker on The Price Is Right. Having heard nothing but Guatemalans speaking English during her formative years, Diana developed an extremely pronounced Guatemalan accent, despite the fact that she didn't know a word of Spanish. Combined with her naturally nasal speaking voice, her accent caused an inordinate number of words to come out in new and exciting ways. This was especially evident whenever she would come over to play with Vanessa, whose name she would invariably pronounce as "Baneena". From there, it wasn't much of a stretch to come up with "Banana", and given that Vanessa will respond to pretty much anything you choose to call her (Nessa, Ness, Banana, Nana, Chuck....), the name stuck.

You may be tempted to call her Banana yourself, but don't even think about doing it; I own the copyright. Get your own nickname.