el blanco

So in addition to reading Calvin y Hobbes with the assistance of babelfish, I’m also starting to watch DVDs with Spanish subtitles — just to see what I can pick up.

This sentence caught my eye:

The line in English was something like, “We could be the butt of a profound joke!”

What got my attention, of course, was that “butt of the joke” is translated as blanco de una broma.

Blanco — my old nickname back in the otherwise all-Puerto Rican Troop 520 in Boy Scouts.

I thought they were calling me “white guy” … but were they actually calling me “butt”? Was I the butt of a joke told only in Spanish? Twenty years later, and I’m only learning this now. Maybe the shoe fit.

(According to babelfish, el blanco means “the target” … which isn’t much better.)