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A card mystery



These fellas are playing cards in the Principe Real Garden, a great place to chill near the Botanical Garden, with lots of wooden benches, huge cypress and ficus trees, and a kiosk where you can get coffee or beer. They were keeping score on a piece of cardboard. I asked what game what they were playing (in retrospect I think I said "What does game is?") They said "Copas." 

This threw me, so I looked up the word on my phone and it means "cups" in Portuguese. It took several minutes to realize that what they're doing is using a French-suited deck like we all use in the English-speaking world (clubs, spades, hearts and diamonds), but applying the terms that the Spanish use for their card suits (batons, swords, cups and coins). So in their minds, a heart is a "cup," a diamond is a "coin" and so on. In other words, they are playing Hearts.

In the U.S. we make a similar mismatched association without thinking about it. Here's how a Spanish deck looks.



The symbol for "baton" looks like something Alley Oop would carry ― you know, an actual club or baton. But a lot of us have been calling clovers "clubs" for so long that they become clubs. Weird, huh?

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