humanist + humorist

Wrote a fic chapter a while back that used “dónde está la biblioteca” as the classic example of “a simple phrase that a character with limited Spanish-fluency can handle.”

A commenter asked if it was a reference to Deadpool…and, no, it’s much older than that. Decades older. It was a meme before internet memes were a thing!

…Which is probably why it’s so hard to trace. KnowYourMeme only documents it as a joke from a 2009 episode of Community, and it wasn’t invented by Community, either.

I’ve found a couple of pre-2009 examples online. Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story is a film from 2004…never seen the whole thing, but I’m pretty sure this is our hero trying to intimidate his business rival with what a worldly big-shot he is:

“Dónde está la biblioteca, Pedro?…We’re opening up a new Globo Gym in Mexico City, I’ve been boning up on my Spanish.”

Going back farther, there’s Bedazzled, from 2000, when the hero gets magically awoken in a world where he’s a suave Latino Spanish-speaker.

He flexes his new skills with several Intro-to-Spanish phrases: “[If Mrs. Klein my Spanish teacher could hear this…] Hola Juan! Hola Esteban! Dónde está la biblioteca? [This is the home of my aunt. No thank you, I’m allergic to shellfish.]”

Looking through the commenters’ examples in two Reddit posts (one from r/OutOfTheLoop, and another from r/community), there’s a couple that aren’t quite right.

• The Fushigi Yuugi dub, from 1998, our heroine sleeping in class gets woken up by her Spanish teacher demanding a translation of “el libro está en la biblioteca”
• They’re All Gonna Laugh At You!, Adam Sandler’s debut comedy album from 1993, has a character who yells in words/phrases he teaches in high school Spanish, and one of them is “biblioteca!”
• Encino Man, from 1992, a character confronted in Spanish responds with the only two phrases he knows, including “[where is the bathroom]?”
• This comment mentions it coming up in the 1980s TV series Living Single, and the 1990s Beavis and Butthead. I couldn’t find any clips of those moments, so I can’t confirm if it’s the exact phrase or a variation
• And this other comment says it’s in a 1970s album by Steve Martin. I have now watched/listened to multiple Steve Martin bits that involve non-English languages, and no sign of las bibliotecas

Multiple commenters remember it being a thing in the 80s and 90s, and several of them specifically date it to “Learn Spanish On The Go” cassette tapes…and, listen, that rings a bell. It checks out with my memories of the 90s, it sounds pretty likely.

…And finding any information about them has been so hard. Searching Youtube and the broader Internet buried me in a landslide of people shilling their current Spanish-language courses, half of them bot-generated. The title’s very generic. I didn’t have any other details to narrow it down.

Thank goodness for the Library of Congress, because I’m guessing this nice bare-bones listing is it. (The date is 2004, but it’s the 3rd edition.)

Publisher: Barron’s. Author: William W. Lawton.

I can’t find this digitized anywhere either. And I don’t exactly have a cassette player these days. But — the cassettes come with a little booklet, with the whole script written out.

Gonna see if I can get my hands on one. It’ll be a few weeks at least. Hopefully I turn up something that makes for a good update post.

In the meantime, if anybody reading this already has a copy…or if you have relevant links for any of the biblioteca references that aren’t here already…drop a comment, let me know.