Let's continue with Arturo Vega's tentative arrival in New York:

Y vine primeramente en el sesenta y nueve para ver qué onda, a ver qué tal estaba Nueva York
"And I first came in sixty-nine to see what was going on, to see how New York was."
[Caption 52, Entrevista > Arturo Vega > 1]

"¿Qué onda?" It's a common question in Mexico and elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world. It's even a common greeting. If you took it literally, the question sounds like "What wave?" -since "qué" (with an accented é) means "what" and "onda" means "wave," technically speaking. While "de onda corta" is "shortwave," as in shortwave radio, note that "onda" can also mean "vibe" informally. And so "qué onda" can mean, basically, "what's up" or "what's going on," as our translators have it. ("What vibe" sounds silly in English.)

Onda in this informal sense seems to have originated in Mexican colloquial speech and is used in a wide variety of ways. This usage has spread throughout Latin America but, by most accounts, continues to be most common in the place it originated.

Note that ola is also a word for "wave," and this is the word used to describe the things that slap the beach. If you talk about an onda when describing a body of water, most native Spanish speakers will take it that you mean a "ripple." So, next time you visit Puerto Escondido, note that a surfista is certainly riding las olas, but might be staying at Cabañas la Buena Onda (The Good Vibe Cabanas) -- which are still so pure that they don't appear to have a website, but we guarantee you they exist (find them at La Punta, "The Point").

Chatting with Arturo Vega, the artistic director of the seminal New York rockers The Ramones, we learn he's from Chihuahua, Mexico (yes, the namesake of those tiny Taco Bell / Paris Hilton dogs). We also learn that he came to the U.S. in "los sesentas" ["the sixties"] -- as in, "los años sesenta." In fact, in just over six minutes of chatting in front of the camera, Vega mentions "los sesentas" four times (in captions 22, 23, 30 and 38, to be precise). But the grammar police say that Vega gets it wrong four times: In proper Spanish, the decades are supposed to be singular, so it's los sesenta (short for los años sesenta).

Well, let's give Vega the benefit of the doubt. You see, Anglicisms in Spanish are increasingly popular. By "Anglicism" here we are referring to the application of a rule of English grammar to Spanish. Besides making decades plural, as an Anglicism, you may hear some family names pluralized in Spanish as the are in English. For example: Los Ramones (as uttered by our interviewer in caption 28) is technically the incorrect way to refer to the members of the fictional Ramone family. (Granted, "los Ramone" does not echo the name of the legendary band....) Note: the band members each took the last name "Ramone" as stage names, but these neighborhood pals from Queens were not, in fact, related, nor born with this surname.

Tip: If you want to hear a more traditional translation of a famous U.S. family into Spanish, tune into Los Simpson. (Yup: it's singular: "Simpson.")