English language slogans slapped on t-shirts and hats in foreign lands serve as a sort of high-hobby for certain aficionadoes, a twisted connoisseurship that leads to sites like Engrish.com (nothing like a 'WAR IS HOMO' shirt to warm the heart). But it gets a little more discomfiting when you're in a country that should know better--i.e. where people speak some English--and you find a t-shirt that slaps irony against ESL and produces something well, gnarly.

Take the Avenida Cordoba clothing store above. Walking by, it looks like it sells your average Williamsburg blue-collar irony: trucker hats, a 'Planet of the Apes' t-shirt, and a Philadelphia 76ers jersey. But look closer then, at the bottom left. To quote a cliche I'd thought I'd never touch, Unh-unh, no they di-int. On-purpose nasty, or intentional irony thwarted by ESL? You make the call.

My favorite such moment, however, passed when I was without camera. Walking down Avenida Libertador--B.A.'s quasi-Riverside Drive--I saw a typical Recoleta woman walking toward me: pretty, wealthy, 30, turned out with a gold-trimmed purse and white pants and clicking on heals with purpose. Her t-shirt? A brown tank top with gold edge-threads emblazoned with a single word--"Mother". How straightforward,I thought, How downright...wholesome.

She then passed me and I saw that the back of her shirt also held a single word, which sent me into peals of laughter.

It said "Fucker."