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I work in an area of town that is very near some neighborhoods where it seems the majority of the people are native Spanish speakers. I was driving through there today to go pick up some lunch and was looking at the rows of small shops lining the streets, all of them with their signage solely in Spanish. One of them was a bakery, and as soon as I saw it, an image of a “Mexican wedding cake” popped into my head. This is what they look like:

Apparently these kinds of cookies are also called Russian tea cakes or Russian tea biscuits, but when I was growing up, I always heard them called Mexican wedding cakes. I started wondering if maybe they used to be called something else, and that maybe the Mexican thing got stuck on there as some sort of weird baking-related ethnic insult. I wondered if I had gone into that little bakery and asked for a Mexican wedding cake, would the proprietor have gotten angry with me for coming into his store and insulting him?

“You don’t think a Mexican can afford a real cake?”

At any rate, I find myself suddenly very uncomfortable with their nomenclature. On the plus side of things, I don’t really ever have to say it since I don’t particularly like that kind of cookie and won’t be asking for one. And I suppose if I ever needed to, I could just ask for “one of the little round cookies with powdered sugar on it.”

This little thought train reminded me that a few years ago I started seriously wondering if the term “spic & span” was born of some jab at hispanics. “Spic” is obviously a racial epithet, and “span” is half of “spanish.” Does anyone think there’s something to that, or am I just overthinking here?

By the way, today is the first day of spring. We’re supposed to get like 6″ of snow tomorrow. WTF?