Oye, compa, ese tipo no tiene trabajo — ahora

My editor, Rick Bonino , forwarded me a correction to a story put out by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service . Since I speak a bit of what would probably be best described as Phrasebook Spanish, he thought I would be interested. The correction involved the obituary of television and movie star Robert Stack , who died Wednesday at the age of 84.

The announcement began by saying that the story was being resent with a new 15th graph, which was “deleting ‘chingas’ for taste concerns.” It went on: “A mistake in translation turned ‘machine gun’ into raw Spanish slang for ‘prostitutes.’ ”

As one of my Mexican friends might say, “Que boboso!”