Carlos Garcia, a tenured teacher at the High School of International Business and Finance in Manhattan, thinks that the guidelines for appropriate classroom language in New York city schools are vague, which is why he’s suing the district for suspending him and fining him $15,000 for using a Spanish word, “cono,” repeatedly in his classroom.
The word, pronounced COHN-yoh, has many slang meanings in various Latino cultures. It’s literal translation refers to the female sexual organs, the word also can express a large number of different emotional states, depending on the culture of the speaker and the situation.
Ricardo Otheguy, a professor of linguistics at the City University of New York and a language researcher, told The Associated Press that, even though context, intonation and articulation would need to be understood in order to determine exactly how inappropriate Garcia was being, there’s no getting around the fact that the word is an expletive.
“I don’t think there’s any getting out of that,” he told the AP in an e-mail.
The New York Department of Education agrees. Their decisions found Garcia to have “lost composure and engaged in impermissible conduct for an educator” when he used the word in his classroom, something that a student who testified claimed happened multiple times a week.
While Garcia’s argument, that he was using the word in a inoffensive slang way, might have some validity, Otheguy thinks that questionable slang doesn’t have a place in the classroom.
“In a setting where people of so many different Latin American origins come together, the norms of what constitutes acceptable language in a classroom, and what constitutes vulgarity or profanity, might perhaps be more relaxed than in the home countries,” Otheguy told the AP. “But it remains true that cono is probably a word to be avoided in the classroom.”
