The question would also apply to any language which assigns genders to nouns: does deliberate switching of genders of the nouns factor in any wordplay like puns or jokes? And is anyone who accidentally misassigns a gender looked at askance or ridiculed?
Sounds like you want words that are distinguished only by gender. Start here: Spanish Nouns Whose Meanings Change With Gender
There are also German nouns which change meaning with gender, for instance:
Der Moment: moment, in the temporal sense, just like in English.
Das Moment: momentum, in the physical sense.
There are others, unfortunately I can’t come up with any at the moment, and I can’t remember any wordplay made about it.
ETA: thought of another example:
Die Leiter: the ladder
Der Leiter: the head/leader (of an institution)
And to also answer this question from the perspective of a language with three grammatical genders: In general, no, Germans will cut everyone some slack who is not a native speaker. Really, it doesn’t impact how comprehensible your speech is if some of your articles are false. There are though some nouns where the gender sometimes is expressed wrong in colloquial speech by native speakers, and maybe some people will make a quip if you misgender these words (among friends). For example, it’s “der Gummi” (rubber), but half of the people will say “das Gummi”. Or “das Klo” (the loo), which some people call “der Klo”, and I have to admit that I always cringe a bit when I hear “der Klo”.
The opinion of Samuel Clemens.
I wonder too if there are opportunities for sarcasm or insult.
I recall an incident with a more leftist member of city council in Toronto decades ago, where an opinion piece referred to “alderman Jane Doe (or whoever) and alderperson John Sewell.” At the time “alderman” was the title and some were trying to make it gender neutral.
Joke’s on them, he became mayor a few years later.
I second what @EinsteinsHund said for German. We know that the whole gender-for-things thing is confusing to people who learn German as a foreign language, especially if they come from a language such as English where all things are neuter. There are some, rare, cases where the same word has different meanings with different genders, and there are very rare cases where this leads to ambiguity or misunderstandings that doesn’t become clear from context. In the vast majority of cases, the use of incorrect gender leaves the sentence perfectly intelligible and is simply a mistake that we’re happy to forgive.
There are also a few words (loan words from other languages) where, even in the same meaning, several genders are correct; the best example that comes to my mind now is yogurt (Joghurt or, since the 1990s spelling reform, Jogurt), which can be masculine or neuter. I’ve been told that Dschungel (jungle) can be any of the three genders, although I have personally only ever heard or read it in the masculine.
Yes, the female jungle is apparently out of fashion.
As for Spanish, nice list. I’m not a native speaker, but quite fluent, and lived in Mexico for several years. I can’t recall wordplay offhand of exactly this type, though surely it happens.
The closest example coming to mind is when a governor of Tabasco state, Francisco Labastida, ran for President (he lost). Political opponents ridiculed him as “La Vestida” — literally, “the dressed [woman],” but colloquially “the cross-dresser.” (“b” and “v” are usually pronounced identically in Mexico).
And in WW2, the leader of the Dutch Nazi movement (who like most of his counterparts in other occupied countries wasn’t much rated by Hitler and other Nazi high-ups) was referred to by his followers as De Leider (leader) - which caused some sniggering among the Germans, since in German leider means “unfortunately”.
Not exactly wordplay, but I tripped at work once, landing on my knee, and came back up to the line limping. One of the employees asked “¿Que pasa?” to which I replied, in my sorta functional spanish, “Tengo dolor en el rodillo.”
Everyone thought that it was quite hilarious that my rolling pin hurt. Became a running joke for some time after that.
Hah!!
I learned a few things from that list, so thanks for posting it. Some of it doesn’t jibe with the dictionary of Spain’s Real Academia, which includes Latin-American usage, so I think it’s safe to consider the discrepancies to be wrong, superfluous or oversights:
Circular: feminine in all cases. In relation to pie charts, it’s an adjective, so there’s no predetermined gender.
Consonante: always feminine. In relation to rhyming, it’s an adjective.
Doblez: either gender in all cases.
Margen: masculine in relation to documents, business and another meaning that could be translated as “opportunity” (enough time, space, etc. for something to happen) but could be either gender when it means an edge (a river bank, for example).
Orden: as indicated but also feminine when used to mean “command.” It’s a significant oversight, as the word is often used that way.
Ordenanza: always feminine, but could be either in relation to someone’s job. The other job-related entries on the list are superfluous (unremarkable because they conform to standard usage).
Radio: as indicated but could be either when referring to the thing you listen to for music and news. I thought it was always feminine in that sense.
Tema: masculine in all cases. If it was ever feminine in the past, it’s not worth mentioning here.
Terminal: masculine in relation to electrical connections but could be either when referring to transport and computers.
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There’s often a change of gender in relation to trees and their fruits. Manzana is apple and manzano is apple tree, naranja is orange and naranjo is orange tree, etc.
Insofar as potentially embarrassing mistakes, pollo is chicken and polla is penis (gallina is hen), and recto is rectum and recta is homestretch (final stage).
Informative post - gracias.
When the guys got together in the cave and formed a language committee to assign words to everything, why did they make a lot of extra work for themselves with the gender stuff? I would have thought gender neutral would be the default.
La polla can also be a national lottery in Chile and a horse race in Peru, which made us giggle a lot in school. Here is a blog that refers to the newspaper headline that always gets mentioned in this context: Mañana se corre la polla del Presidente. It was no joke, but it made us laugh. We were young and childish.
Una recta is also a straight line, like in geometry.
Johann Cruyff (the football player and manager) was well known for making an absolute mess of genders in his spoken Spanish. But he was perfectly understandable and only second rate comedians mocked him for that. I can think of no puns or jokes related to gender pronouns in Spanish. There must be some, but probably not very funny ones.
Concerning German, I second EinsteinsHund and Schnitte. Being officially German myself it is a bit embarrassing that I sometimes confuse masculine and neuter pronouns (never female, interestingly enough), but nobody has ever laughed at me because of that and lived to tell the tale (ups! That’s not funny either… I meant: not in my face).
In America, people quip when you call an eraser a rubber.
They didn’t assign them according to gender. They assigned them to categories (largely organically through suffixes, sound changes, etc.), and only when they had the categories did they assign gender: to the categories, and thus to everything in them.
There’s no end of these, between British and American - that’s a whole thread by itself.
(Which reminds me of the movie title “Free Willy”. Is polla in the same category, a slang term, or like “cock” a word that is firmly established with two meanings, or is it the actual word? And why is it feminine?)