I'm resigning myself to always feeling like the most ignorant person present - the one who needs everything explained, including insults and jokes - however as a small compensation to offset this, I can enjoy the fleeting moments when I get to feel superior and in-the-know - i.e. when English is used in a wonky way.

If ever I'm feeling down in the mouth about asking for a needle so I can cook my clothes, or always getting my subjunctives wrong, all I need to do is ask for the English menu in a restaurant, for a quick cheap giggle.  Even the Spanish version of the menu can yield a laugh or two; I was delighted once to have my pronunciation corrected when I ordered a grilled chicken salad (on the menu it was precisely that, in English, "Grilled chicken salad") - according to the waiter "grilled" is pronounced "gree-shed".  I humoured him.

Near my place there's an icecream store whose name "Wimpy", literally emblazoned in neon, gives me a slight smirk, as does the chain of pizzerias called "Pizza Bum!!" (yes, complete with exclamation marks). 

Of course there are lots of perfectly well-used borrowings from English (like "internet", "web", "mouse", "hot" (as in 'hot chick') etc.), but stranger are those that that don't really exist in English or a used quite differently. "Country", for example, has nothing to do with how nations are delimited, nor with anything rural. A "country" is a gated community (which seem to exist so that instead of being robbed by just any old burglar, you can feel safe in the knowledge that your stuff was pinched by employees of the community's security company).

There are some slippery-slope borrowings, like "camping" - which means in Spanish what it does in English - the strangely popular practice of eschewing 5000 years of architectural advancement for living a few precious nights in some clearing or other with only breezy canvas between you and the elements and insects of the untamed wild.  However, it also has come to signify said clearing - as in "I drove for eight infernal hours through the pouring rain only to find that the camping was full" (i.e. for us Saxons it would be "camp site" or "camp ground").

This dropping-off of an important word also happens in the case of "living", as in "Give me a choice between a tent full of mosquitos and watching telly in the living, and I'll go for the living every time" - it seems that for latin americans, adding the word "room" is superfluous.

It seems as though Spanish speakers like the "ing" at the end of the word quite a lot - they also have "jogging", which does signify another strange modern fad as it does in English, but has also extended to mean the clothes you wear when you're doing it ("trakkies" for us antipodean anglophones) - for example whenever the aging Fidel appears in the newspaper these days, the journos always point out that he's wearing his "jogging" instead of the revolutionary fatigues of former days.

But the parting of ways from English really gets going when they say that instead of jogging they've taken up "footing" - which arguably makes more sense than "wise walking", but I doubt that any native English speaker has ever uttered the word to refer to this third puzzling passtime.  Similarly "brushing" makes a certain sense I guess (although I'm rather dimwitted, and puzzled for a long time about the signs bearing this word in hair-salon windows meant).  For me a "brushing" is what you might give your unwilling burmese cat to avert knotty fur, but in Argentina it seems to be what you treat yourself to when you're having a bad-hair day.

In the word "bicing" (pronounced, I'm pretty sure, "bee-seeng"), the Chileans seem to have borrowed only the suffix.  Apparently this is the latest thing in Santiago: the city government sprinkles the city with bicycles, which citizens can rent for an hour or an afternoon to get from hither to thither, and when they get to thither, they can leave it at the nearest "bicing" depot instead of having to return it to hither.  When you hire one of these 'civil' bikes, you're engaging in "bicing".