What is “Obuábamos?”

Last year, I took a class conducted entirely on Blogger, and ever since I've rather wanted to go back to blogging. Unfortunately, I really haven't had the time to do so, nor any particularly interesting subject matter. But now, as I'm about to embark on Walkabout, I feel I may have something interesting or unique to say now and again. So I'm going to make an endeavor to keep a blog, updating it hopefully twice over the week and at least once over weekends. I will probably be recycling Walkabout journals—why not? And I plan to actually respond to other blogs that I read and increase my blog-reading. It'll be fun! But Miriam, you ask, that's all well and good but I wanted to know what you mean by "obuábamos."

Well I'll tell you. Long, long ago, my freshman year of high school, I a really great Spanish class. I don't mean that my teacher was any good or that I learned much about Spanish—I hardly did at all—but that the class itself, the people in it, was great. Freshman Spanish was made up of one of the most entertaining groups of people I've worked with to date. The story of the word "obuábamos" comes from that class.

It's really not all that remarkable a story. We were learning, that fateful day, how to conjugate the past imperfect tense that indicates past actions that took place over an unknown amount of time. For verbs ending in "ar," the conjugation is, "___aba, ___abas, ___aban, ___ábamos, ___aban." This makes for some truly fun to say words, especially in the nosotros form. The class meanwhile disintegrated into an excited clamor of, "hablábamos! bailábamos! trabajábamos!"

Meanwhile, I had discovered a French dictionary. For some reason this caused me to contemplate the French spelling of the word "oboe." You see, oboe is something of an obsession of mine, and such ponderings were hardly unusual on my part. My teacher had once told me both the French pronunciation of the "oboe" (O-bwah) and its spelling, but I had regretfully forgotten the latter. The presence of a French dictionary seemed a perfect opportunity to remedy the situation. And so I looked. The proper spelling of "oboe" in French, by the way, is "hautbois."

Well I wanted to share this new knowledge, but my class was somewhat preoccupied with theirs. And so, among the excited conjugating of verbs into the imperfect nosotros form, an entirely new word joined the ranks: obuábamos. "We used to oboe." Now why would I name my blog such a statement? Who is "we?" Why not anymore? Is "obuar" really a verb? No, no, no, you have it all wrong. I named my blog "obuábamos" because no one else is using the word. There are (were) no Google hits for it. In this way, "obuábamos" is the perfect name for my blog.