¿Benedikta Arnold?
What we do is usually understood; words sometimes help, other times hinder
Most Wanted: Furry Traitor Twinkles
The Bite That Sparked It All
It happened on an ordinary Sunday night. I had been out of town, and my girlfriend and my Chihuahua mix, Twinkles, had spent a weekend of girl-bonding bliss. When I returned, I climbed into bed with the two of them. For once, the house was calm.
Then came betrayal. My four-pound dog, usually loyal to a fault, sank her tiny teeth into my hand. It was barely a scratch — but it was on purpose. And that made me furious.
Without thinking, I exploded:
“Twinkle — you’re a Benedikta Arnold!”
To me, the meaning was obvious. To my Latina girlfriend, it was anything but. She sat up straight, narrowed her eyes, and said:
“¿Qué carajos estás diciendo? ¿Quién es esa monja, tu exnovia?”
(What the hell are you saying? Who is that nun, your ex-girlfriend?)
Direct, sharp, and — I admit — hilarious.
Idioms: America’s Secret Code
American English is a language of shortcuts. We speak in idioms, slang, metaphors, and cultural references that make little literal sense but carry centuries of baggage.
And idioms? They’re the trickiest of all. To insiders they’re shortcuts; to outsiders they’re riddles. Just think about the ones we toss around with “dog” baked in:
In the doghouse — though no one’s actually sleeping outside.
Dog days — when the calendar, not the weather, decides the season.
You’re dogging it — which sounds like loyalty, but usually means slacking.
For Americans, these phrases are second nature. For someone new to the culture, they’re nonsense. Twinkles never had that problem. She didn’t need a dictionary to know when she was in the doghouse — her eyes told the story.
The Smarmiest Traitor
“Benedict Arnold” is one of the sharpest idioms in our arsenal. For Americans, he’s treachery personified — the Revolutionary War general who sold out his country. The motives were money and rank, but history remembers the twist: a girl. Peggy Shippen, his young Loyalist wife, nudged him across the line — into full-on turncoat.
That detail makes Arnold even slimier. Not just a traitor, but a man swayed by romance into betrayal.
For my girlfriend, who never sat through a U.S. history class, the name landed with a thud. Twinkles, oddly enough, got it. Dogs are masters of context. She knew she’d crossed a line and looked at me with eyes that said: “Okay, Dad, I messed up.”
My girlfriend, on the other hand, had the history but not the code.
That was my revelation: context alone isn’t always enough. Sometimes our words require both context and empathy to be understood.
Lost in Translation, Found in Empathy
In the heat of the moment, I had unleashed the emotional power of American English. To me, it was universal. To her, it was meaningless.
I let things cool down and tried again. I sighed, looked at her, and said slowly:
“Benedict Arnold… parecía tu amigo, pero no lo era.”
(He seemed like your friend, but he wasn’t.)
This time, she threw her head back and laughed.
“¡Ahhh! Entonces es como Judas. ¿Por qué no lo dijiste así desde el principio?”
(Ahhh! So it’s like Judas. Why didn’t you just say that in the first place?)
Puzzle solved. The meaning clicked not because I softened my anger, but because I translated both the words and the empathy behind them.
Twinkles was still trembling at the end of the bed, perhaps wondering whether her treachery would carry a life sentence. Finally, I relented.
“Okay, Benedikta, you’re out of the doghouse. Let’s go to the parque.”
She didn’t need to know what “doghouse” meant to understand my tone. Forgiveness, like frustration, transcends language.
A Spanish Inquistion
But the incident didn’t end there. A week later, after enduring another barrage of my idioms — “don’t count your chickens,” “water under the bridge,” “once in a blue moon” — my girlfriend finally snapped.
She folded her arms, looked at me dead-on, and declared:
“¡Ya basta! Español solamente. Por una semana. Ni una expresión más enredada. Ni un gringoísmo. Solo español, ¿me entiendes?”
(Enough! Spanish only. For a week. No twisted expressions. No gringo-isms. Just Spanish, do you understand?)
In other words: not only was I in the doghouse, I was in verbal jail.
It felt like she had put me on a leash. For a man who lives to riff in figurative English, I suddenly found myself muzzled. No shortcuts, no clever turns of phrase. Just basic, direct Spanish.
At first, I sulked. Then I realized she was right. Idioms weren’t communication; they were decoration. Spanish-only week forced me to strip them away and actually connect.
By the end, something unexpected happened: I began to enjoy the leash. Spanish grounded me. It slowed me down, stripped away the performance, and made my words earn their keep.
Why We Lean on Idioms
That week also made me ask: why do Americans lean so heavily on idioms in the first place?
Partly it’s laziness — a way of wrapping a complex idea into a single phrase. Instead of saying, “You are being ungrateful after everything I’ve done,” we say, “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”
Partly it’s playfulness. Idioms make us feel clever. “Raining cats and dogs” paints a sillier picture than “raining heavily.”
But mostly, idioms are cultural passwords. They sort insiders from outsiders. If you know who Benedict Arnold was, you belong to the club of American history students. If you don’t, you’re on the outside.
The problem is that globalization has made our club much bigger. We live, work, and love across languages. Idioms, once convenient shorthand, can become barriers.
A Catalogue of Confusion
“Benedikta Arnold” wasn’t my first stumble.
At dinner once, I warned my girlfriend not to “spill the beans.” She looked at the table and said: “No hay frijoles aquí, mi amor.” (There aren’t any beans here, my love.)
Watching a soccer game, I groaned about “dropping the ball.” She replied: “Pues claro, ¡es fútbol! Siempre lo sueltan.” (Of course, it’s soccer! They’re always dropping it.)
When a colleague from Spain heard an American say a project had “kicked the bucket,” he sent a worried Slack message: “¿Quién murió?” (Who died?)
The pattern was clear: what felt like clarity to me was often noise to others.
Lessons From a Tiny Traitor
That jealous little bite from Twinkles left me with lessons bigger than the mark on my hand:
Conoce tu audiencia. What lands in one language may not in another.
Idioms can bond or break. They enrich when shared but alienate when assumed.
Context matters, but empathy seals it. Meeting people where they are is the real shortcut.
Body language never lies. It’s often an X-ray to understanding.
Humor heals. A laugh can patch the gap faster than a dictionary.
Dogs understand more than you think. But unlike people, they don’t need metaphors.
Out of the Doghouse
In the end, “Benedikta Arnold” became an inside joke. My girlfriend still teases Twinkles with the name. And Twinkles, for all her flaws, has remained loyal — mostly.
What stuck with me is how natural it felt, in the heat of anger, to reach for an idiom that excluded the very person I most wanted to understand me. That’s the paradox of American English: our figurative speech can make us feel precise, even universal, while in reality it only works for those who already share the code.
The real loyalty test wasn’t the dog bite. It was whether I could translate not just the words but the meaning behind them. Context plus empathy — and, sometimes, restraint — are the only ways idioms survive the trip across cultures.
And as for Twinkles? She’s still a little traitor at heart. But she knows she’s loved — even if she’ll never understand why her worst betrayal turned her into a Benedict Arnold.
