Man Wants to Stop Dining With His Mom at Mexican Restaurants Over Her Mispronunciations — Reddit Says He Is “Acting Like a Teenager”

A man's post to Reddit's r/AmItheAsshole about his mother ordering "ferret sauce" at a Mexican restaurant is making the rounds online.

The man, posting as 31M, described his mother — whom he called Debbie — as a sheltered woman in her early 60s who rarely leaves her hometown and has never traveled beyond their home state.

According to his post, Debbie considers ranch dressing a spicy condiment. The problem arises because Debbie has a particular fondness for Mexican cuisine. A few times a month, the two go out to dinner together.

The post listed several of Debbie's mispronunciations that her son said had been building his frustration for some time. She says "tortilla" to rhyme with "Manila." She pronounces "chipotle" to rhyme with "bottle". "Tamale," she delivers to rhyme with "pale." The list goes on. Her son finds it mortifying, and that feeling has been building for a while.

The situation came to a head last weekend when Debbie tried to order her favorite mole sauce. She couldn't think of the name, so she explained to the waiter what she meant: "It's a small animal like a groundhog, but I don't remember."

she had apparently associated the word "mole" with the burrowing animal rather than the sauce and landed on "ferret" as the closest creature she could think of. The waiter was lost. Her son was mortified.

He has now decided he will no longer visit non-American restaurants with her unless she makes a genuine effort to pronounce things correctly. He announced in the post that he would no longer take her to Mexican or other international restaurants unless she made a genuine effort to learn the correct pronunciations. He asked Reddit whether that made him a bad person.

Reddit was not in his favor. One user wrote: "YTA. It's a clueless mom moment, not a hate crime. Ferret sauce is actually hilarious, just translate for her and enjoy the tacos. You're 31, stop acting like a teenager embarrassed by their parents. One day you'll wish you were grabbin' chibottles with her."

A second commenter tried to reason with him: "She is ignorant but so what? Maybe tell her how to pronounce things correctly instead of judging her for not intuitively knowing how to pronounce foreign words?"

A third commenter wrote, "YTA. She's old and doesn't know better, and you're making a mountain out of a ferret hill. She said something wrong and a little embarrassing, she didn't smoke bomb the place while yelling slurs."

Reddit kept returning to the same obvious point. Debbie is simply unfamiliar with the terms, and the distinction between "mole" the sauce and "mole" the animal is, in retrospect, an honest one to fall into.

She is not being unkind or disrespectful. The consensus was that teaching her the correct pronunciations would be far more productive than refusing to dine with her.