There’s a story about a certain Costa Rican president who, upon Pope John Paul’s death, went on television to announce to the Gringo audience in English, “I have bad news. Our potato is gone.”

If you don’t get it, read on.

It’s hard enough for native English speakers to remember that Spanish words ending with -o are masculine and -a feminine and, accordingly, we have to make adjectives agree with them. It turns out there are exceptions of various kinds. Let’s look at some of them.