Ed Whelan highlights some baffling lines from a 1996 speech by Sotomayor:
When my first mid-term paper came back to me my first semester, I found out that my Latina background had created difficulties in my writing that I needed to overcome. For example, in Spanish, we do not have adjectives. A noun is described with a preposition, a cotton shirt in Spanish is a shirt of cotton, una camisa de agodon, no agondon camisa.
Just to make sure that Sotomayor's assertion is ludicrous, Whelan contacted a native Spanish speaker to confirm that, indeed, it is. Even students taking introductory Spanish courses in high school would recognize that her statement is just bizarre. It's suprising that a self-described wise woman, or mujer [noun] sabia [adjective], who's said to be a stickler for grammar is so confused on this point. As Whelan notes, John Rosenberg provides a ' brief lesson on Spanish adjectives' at the blog Discriminations.