Gana La Verde

A reality show named Gana La Verde began production several months ago by a television station in Los Angeles. It has been nothing but controversial not only in the US, but also in the international media. For fans of reality shows, imagine Fear Factor, the same type of challenges and feeling, except in Spanish and instead of the cash prize at the end, the winner gets a group of immigration lawyers for a year who will help adjust his legal status in the US. Its contestants, though particularly Hispanic, are of all nationalities. For further details on the legal side of the controversy, I direct you to various articles on the internet already. What we are concerned with here is language-related: the show's title. When I first heard about the show a few months back, I interpreted its title, Gana La Verde, as something completely different than its actual meaning. Before it premiered, the show's publicity was very mysterious, not truly revealing what the show would be about; it simply told viewers to be ready for Gana La Verde and with a green screen, it anticipated that it would be like nothing before it. I expected its premiere to find out what it was actually about. Until the moment I watched the show for the first time, I had a complete different idea of the show's premise, all having to do with misinterpreting its title, as I said. Following here, we'll take a look at the the possible interpretations of the phrase Gana La Verde, just like that as it appeared on the show's promotions, without any punctuation.

1

Gana	la	verde
wins	the (f)	green
The green one wins.

Until I watched the show, this what I always thought the phrase meant, interpreting la verde as a postverbal subject, in a subject-verb inversion, so that this could be rewritten as La verde gana, meaning "The green one wins". Saying Gana la verde puts a little more emphasis on the subject so that a more accurate translation would be "It's the green one that wins". I thought that la verde (the green one) stood for la cosa verde (the green thing) and that it symbolized money, or, more specifically, US dollars. I figured the show dared contestants to beat its challenges, but that in the end, the show itself would beat the contestants.

2

Gana	la	verde
he-wins	the (f)	green
He wins the green one.

This is another interpretation I considered. I treated gana as having an implicit subject and la verde as the direct object, as oppossed to the previous consideration where la verde was actually treated as a postverbal subject. This is actually a confusion which has the potential of arising frequently in Spanish, though most of the time, context clears any doubt. As I have seen it, it is also this confusion the one mainly responsible for laísmo, leísmo and loísmo in Spanish (see this entry to read about this). It is common, then, to see an inanimate direct object introduced by the Spanish "personal a", even though historically and prescriptively, only animate objects invoke it. Especially in Spain and particularly in the more formal registers, we then see combinations of the sort Vió a la mesa (He saw the table), with a "personal a" on an inanimate object to make clear that the object is "the table"; vió la mesa is more habitual, and technically, it could mean both "he saw the table" and "the table saw", this interchange of meanings happening generally only with the third person (laísmos et al. do too and so are directly connected).

3

Gana	la	verde
win	the (f)	green
Win the green one!

This is the true meaning of the phrase: "Win the green one!". It is actually a second-person singular imperative, telling the contestants to go and win the green one... not the dollars, as I believed, but the green card (i.e. permanent resident card). My confusion, then, came because of two reasons: 1) the second-person singular imperative in Spanish is nearly always the same than the third-person singular indicative form; 2) the phrase appeared with no punctuation at all. If I had seen it from the beginning with an exclamation mark, I would have interpreted it correctly. Since it didn't, I had to go through that whole tour de force. This could arise with nearly any verb in Spanish, though, like I said, context clears things out most of the time (e.g. canta just like that can mean "sing!" or "he sings"); except in this case, I didn't really have a context that would help me. To all future reality show producers and creators: next time, use punctuation please!