No Emparedados

For Panama's modern-minded younger generation, life can be very nais indeed. As a starter, senoritas may pay a visit to what they call a biutiparlor for a champu and a maniquiur. In a franker bid for a picop, some apply lipstic from a vaniti-queis right out in the street. Depending on how much of a bigchot she attracts, a lucky girl will eat jot dogs and aiscrim, go to the muvis, drink jai bols at a cocteil parti, or perhaps even go for a dip in the boy friend's suiminpul.

To the puzzlement of parents, many a daughter comes home bubbling about the terrific nocaut at the fights or the jonrons which piled up the escor at the beisbol game. But if her deit was real quiut, she might say very little about how they spent the evening--parqueando in his car.

Young Panama's vocabulary contains only a part of the Americanisms that have invaded the everyday Spanish of the Isthmus, mainly by infiltration from the English-speaking Canal Zone. Other beachheads, on subjects ranging from elegant eating (at a dinerdans) to economic blockade (boicot), include chingongo (chewing gum), guachiman (watchman), daim (dime), bichicomer, the verbs blofear (to bluff) and quidnapear, the meaningful noun pul.

Far more disturbed by the new words than by the old things they signify, nationalists and lingual purists have long resisted the verbal invasion, to less & less avail. Last week, admitting defeat on the spoken front, a group called the Commission for the Preservation of Spanish launched a last-ditch counteroffensive by invoking a long-dormant law regarding billboards.

The law states that all foreign-language posters and signs must include--in bigger type--a Spanish translation. Offenders are subject to a fine of $2.50 a day per sign. To businessmen who have festooned Panama with such slogans as Royal Crown Cola's "Best by Taste-Test," strict enforcement could be a headache. But most Panamanians seemed unimpressed. Snorted a reporter for one of Panama's newspapers (over which the commission has no control): "We common people will still ask for sanwiches, not emparedados, when we go to lonch."

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