I Am Bella

Earlier today, I met an 11-year old 5th grader who happens to be my namesake (Who am I? I am _____ ). A table away from her at this elementary school where I was a volunteer teacher was a 10-year old named Bella. Both girls received best nameplate awards from me. Call it a biased decision but my namesake (fine, let's call her "Precious") and Bella were very creative with their nameplates. Precious used an alternating color pattern when she wrote the letters of her name and Bella wrote "I Am Bella" on her nameplate (Que Bella! Chi Bello! Get it? Get it?). Suffice to say, both were so creative that I had to justify to the rest of the class why I picked them as my winners.

A few years back, I was sent by my last company to Nicaragua, a Central American country with mostly Spanish-speaking people, to conduct language training to call center applicants. In an attempt to impress my trainees, I introduced myself in Spanish:

"Buenos dias! Yo soy Preciosa."

Dead silence. Fail!

It was my first ever lesson from actual native speakers of Spanish! You see, my parents named me "Maria Preciosa" because first of all, my mom was a devotee of the Blessed Mother. She and dad waited 13 years to have a baby (me!), thus the "precious" part of my name. Such were in my mind, not to mention, textbook definitions that had led me to believe that the only meaning of "precious" was unique and/or valuable.

Uh... No.

In Spanish, especially in Latin American countries, "precious" means "beautiful". If we were to go by all these, my trainees' dead silence after my spectacular introduction most probably was an indication that their thought bubbles contained a response like this:

"Did she really introduce herself as 'beautiful'?"

Or...

"Does she really think she is beautiful?"

Please. Do me a favor and find out the answer, yourselves, from my parents.