So I’ve been teaching my secondary students using stories on occasion, and on Wednesday I began using a re-told version of Rip van Winkle, given to me by one of the teachers I work with — she had read it when she was in school.

It’s a kind of awful re-telling, but the simplicity does make it easy enough for them to understand, with a few explanations every two paragraphs or so. And it’s divided into chapters, which helps. So we’re reading Rip van Winkle, or they’re reading it aloud as I correct their pronunciation (they haven’t learned any of the rules for pronouncing things in the past, or most of them haven’t — they’re filled with play-éd and walk-éd), and we come across a section that says something along the lines of, “he came across a narrow passage through high rocks.” I figure they won’t understand the word “passage,” so we stop, and I ask if they get the phrase.

“Profe,” they ask me, “¿qué significa ‘narrow’?”

So I try to explain to them the difference between wide and narrow. I say, “Take Arturo Soría, for example. That’s a wide street.” I gesture with my hands. “And Umbria, here? It’s narrow.” They get it after a moment.

“Estrecho?” Álvaro asks. “Ancho y estrecho.”

“Exactly,” I tell him. “Estrecho, angosto. Narrow.”

He looks at me, and laughs. “Justin,” he says, “angosto no es una palabra en español.” (It’s worth remembering that they don’t say my name right. They neither call me Justin nor Who-steen, but rather something that I would spell Yasteen in English phonetics. Or, in IPA (which I’m trying to learn the basics of) maybe jæstiːn.)

I tell them I think maybe it’s Italian, and that I believe them, as the rest rush in to agree with Álvaro. But I go and look in a Spanish language dictionary just the same. And there it is. Angosto, ta. adj. Que tiene menos anchura de lo que es habitual. Sin. estrecho. A definition. Actually, to be fair, it wasn’t that definition. I looked this up in a different dictionary. But nonetheless.

When we asked Tomás, a student who moved here from Argentina a few years ago, he knew the word. Which makes since, seeing as how I think I learned it there. And when I look it up in an English-Spanish dictionary, it comes out as “AmL” in usage. Nonetheless.