User:Newts/ganga
The Spanish phrase "¡Qué ganga!" is often used by Spanish and English speakers alike. In addition to its current literal meaning, "What a bargain!", it is often used to convey intense feelings of happiness and/or pleasant surprise. The phrase has a long and interesting history dating back to the creation of the Spanish language itself.
The word "ganga" literally means "gan" - or an archaic spelling of "Gay Am I Not" - plus "ga" - literally, "Green Apples." While it might appear at first glance that this was just homophobic trash, it actually was a question—at least originally. "Gay", you see, was another (presumably straight) guy, and the speaker was asking him, "Am I not green apples?" (The speaker was rather new to English, and so—despite suspecting something fishy—could not discern whether a mischeveous prankster was attempting to trick him or not by telling him, "Hey, you're Green Apples!") His friend Gay's response was lost to history.
That was the original theory, of course. Newer evidence suggests that the original, pre-"ganga" statement was "Quinn, you eat green apples?" Obviously, "Quinn" was some mighty force back in those days, as opposed to current times, where anyone named Quinn is probable to be off his rocker (at least a little). The speaker of "ganga" was apparently worried about being eaten (it would appear that Quinn had nodded to signify an affirmative answer). After Gay presumably shook his head at the question, the newly liberated and relieved speaker shouted out, "What a bargain!!" and the new meaning of "qué ganga" was founded. The accent comes from the fact that in the sentence, "Quinn, you eat green apples?", the "eat" is obviously accentuated. The exclamation points come from the two easily heard in the speaker's voice, but with one moved to the front and flipped upside down for reasons still lost to the civilized world. A tradition was born!
Later, when questioned on the matter, the speaker invented the Spanish language off the top of his head as an excuse. That's why it was so retarded at the time (who decided that "was" and "went" were going to conjugate the exact same way? Surely no one that had any time at all to think the language up!), though after stumbling through a few crummy sentences like "I put the shoes on" and "I like my shoes", the speaker - who we will now simply call "Señor Ganga" for short - decided he liked the language and tried to improve it. The problem was that even though the rest of the language went well, the damage was irreversibly done. Though words like "ser" were attempted to be placed into the language as totally regular verbs, the plan fell to pieces when Señor Ganga presented his "mother tongue", the Spanish language, to his old friends. the original questioners quizzed the founder on why the verbs had changed. They also wondered what had happened to the ridiculous words like "tuviera". Señor Ganga had to pretend that he had merely forgotten those parts, and was forced to work them back in. That's how we got the mess that we are left with now. Idiot things like "por" and "para", the overuse of the subjunctive mood, and an irrational arrogance towards those who were lucky enough to be born into a house where a decent language was actually spoken have remained ingrained into "Spanish culture" (also invented, by aid of a lot of alcohol, by Señor Ganga).
So, to summarize, there was one amazing phrase - "¡Qué ganga!" - to go along ith a couple of other semi-useful (corn, tomatoes, "hasta la vista") and vaguely useful (the Mayan calendar, the Running of the Bulls, the rolling of rr's and the "ñ" sound) artifacts that were all created, directly and indirectly, by Señor Ganga. On the other hand, there's still the subjunctive mood; two bewilderingly different past tenses; a whopping six different conjugations of each verb (or, in a few cases, a "mere" five) in every tense; the ridiculous gender differences of inanimate objects (okay, so a face is female, your eyes are male, hands look male but are actually female... and we're supposed to keep all of this straight?); teachers that insist that "it all makes sense", "it's all about the pronunciation" (one of the least helpful statements ever recorded, just behind "hey Hitler, let's invade Russia!"), etc., not to mention saying that you can always tell the pronunciation by the spelling (oh yeah? Try pronouncing "México"); an insistence on language snobbery, such that anyone who spends years of their life trying to learn the language still gets looked down upon as a filthy "gringo" if the Spanish people decide that they don't like the color of the speaker's skin or the way his accent isn't "perfectísimo"; and a culture that reveres the dead so much that the participants don't have time to get around to creating an economy besides drinking tequila.
Overall, kind of a wash.