Category Archives: Weather

A Hard Freeze’s A-Gonna Fall

Posted on May 16, 2013 | 5 Comments

. . . right in the middle of a doctor’s appointment you’re interpreting, at least if your day goes anything like mine did. It was just a routine allergies visit filled with words I hear and interpret almost daily: pollen, dust mite covers, saline solution, antihistamines, mold. So routine I almost do it on autopilot. And then the doctor said a phrase that jolted me awake:

hard freeze

Hard freeze? She had said something like, You can continue taking your medicines until the first hard freeze in November or so. And I went all Porky Pig, stuttering and stammering like an idiot. It’s so uncharacteristic of me to lose my cool, but lose it I did. Hard freeze? I think in ordinary circumstances I would have known what that was and recognized it, but it totally caught me off guard in this medical context. Hard freeze? A good description of what happened to my brain at that moment. Try as I might, I simply couldn’t thaw it in time.

Hard freeze? The more I scrambled, the further away I was getting from an answer. I was grasping at straws and not catching any of them. I couldn’t even picture a hard freeze in my mind–I just saw snowflakes on the ground every time I tried, and that wasn’t any help. Sometimes I wonder if I’m a city mouse or a country mouse, and this was one moment where it became embarrassingly obvious how removed I’ve become from the intricacies of nature and her rhythms. What takes place during a hard freeze, anyway? Or even just a freeze? I would settle for that. I can do a brain freeze, a hiring freeze, a credit freeze, a computer freeze– but an actual honest-to-goodness freeze? It had been far too long since I’d experienced one of those in English, and forget about Spanish. I lived in the city of eternal spring in Colombia. The book I’ve been reading is taking place in the sweltering heat of the Colombian coast. The music in my car right now is joropo from the Colombian plains–not much freezing going on in any of those places. I guess I’ll have to go scale some snow-capped mountains in Chile to authentically experience and understand a Spanish freeze.

Frosty rose

I ended up doing my best to explain the idea to the patient, but I was frosty–I mean fuzzy–on it myself. So, I came home with my tail between my legs and am now trying to do penance. I will never let myself be caught off guard by a freeze again–hard, soft, or anywhere in between.

It looks like a freeze is una helada. Looking on linguee.com, I see hard freeze translated as helada fuerte. Hopefully that would do the trick. Wiktionary defines a hard freeze as: A freeze sufficiently long and severe to destroy seasonal vegetation and lead to ice formation in standing water and hard ground. Three degrees Celsius below freezing is considered a threshold in the US. If I were interpreting at a gardener’s convention, sure, I’d make certain that everyone was clear on exactly what kind of freeze we were talking about. I don’t think meteorological exactness was necessary today, though. (But speak up if you don’t agree!)

I see that frost on the ground is escarcha. Ahh. Now I do have some experience with escarcha. When buying a refrigerator in Bogotá, I remember the units at the stores boasting on their tags that they were anti-escarcha– no frost. I’ve also heard the word used for glitter. Escarchar exists as a verb; a rather ugly one, to my mind. Thinking about freezers in Colombia, I remember once sticking a few pairs of new shoes stuffed with water-filled bags in my freezer in Medellín to stretch them out. When someone later opened it, their eyes bugged out of their head when they saw my footwear just chilling out in the freezer as if that were the most natural place for them to be. Crazy Americans.

Frostbite? Congelación, congelamiento, quemadura por frío, sabañones (chilblains). Even in English, it’s congelatio in medical terminology.

Frosty en español, Frosty in Spanish

(I’m sure there’s nothing like pairing an ice-cold Frosty with a hot, steaming Brosty [a popular name for fried chicken chains in Medellín].)

Brosty pollo Medellín

Jack Frost? Try Juanito Escarcha. Frosty the Snowman? Frosty el hombre de nieve, or Frosty el muñeco de nieve. Robert Frost? Roberto Escarcha. Easy peasy.

Just when I was starting to confiarme, it was good to get thrown for a loop. What was the last word to utterly discombobulate you?

(I know my play on words with A Man for All Seasons was a bit obscure, but if you don’t get the one in this title . . . ¡debería darte pena!)

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Posted in Interpreting, Jobs, Medical, Music, My Mistakes, Weather

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Amanecer for all seasons

Posted on April 30, 2013 | 5 Comments

For some reason, this old post on some of my favorite words in Spanish has been getting a lot of traffic lately. Those words are great, but unfortunately I don’t find many opportunities to work floripondio, acuatizaje, or gordinflón into conversations. (Despite our obesity epidemic, we Americans are pretty touchy about this being pointed out to us. Thus, you can only think gordinflón; you can’t say it. Unless you’re The Onion, of course.)

Some of the words on that list do get a lot of mileage in my daily parlance, though: words like mijo/mija, ojalá, and pues. Today I want to write about amanecer, the second word on the list. He’s number two, but he tries harder than number one (inmiscuirse), and he’s infinitely more interesting. He’s also much more useful than, say, pluviosidad. Of course, I support beauty for beauty’s sake, so there’s nothing wrong with being beautiful and (practically) useless. We just get more opportunities to admire the loveliness of words like amanecer when they lend themselves more easily to the prose of daily life.

I’m sure you’re familiar with amanecer. It means to dawn, for the sun to come up. Amanecer as a noun means sunrise, dawn, daybreak.

Hoy amaneció a las 5:55. 

Today the sun came up at 5:55.

Rezo por ti cada noche, amanece y pienso en ti. (Shakira)

I pray for you every night; at dawn I think of you.

Después del concierto nos quedamos tomando vino hasta que amanecía.

After the concert we drank wine until it was beginning to get light out.

Image by °lorenalreves° via Flickr Creative Commons

Nunca alcanzamos a ver el amanecer juntos.

We never got a chance to watch a sunrise together.

Another very widespread usage of amanecer is to wake up, especially to talk about your location or how you feel. ¿Cómo amaneciste? is the standard question for this, and you ask it to your fellow household dwellers (partner, family) as you groggily pad about in the mornings. You can also ask close friends or coworkers if it’s still a.m. What is it asking? Poetically, how did you dawn? (You can, after all, tell people that they’re un sol–a sweetheart–so why can’t they dawn and dusk?) Really, it’s, how’d you sleep? How are you feeling this morning? Did you wake up on the right side of the bed? Rodney wrote a post on it a while back. Ojo, it usually sounds more like ¿Cómo ‘maneciste?

Describing how you feel:

Sudafed te tumba pero amaneces renovada. Es buenísimo.

Sudafed will knock you out, but you’ll wake up a new person. It’s amazing.

Amanecí bien, pero hoy salí bastante aburrido del trabajo.

I felt good this morning, but I left work today extremely unhappy.

En estos días mi niño me amanece enfermito y con una infección en los ojitos.

The past few days, my son has been waking up sick and with an eye infection.

amanecí duro

Describing where you are:

Amanecí otra vez entre tus brazos, y desperté llorando de alegría. (Chavela Vargas)

At daybreak I found myself once again in your arms, and I awoke crying tears of happiness.

Nos quedamos dormidos en el avión y amanecimos sobre Madrid. 

We fell asleep on the plane and woke up over Madrid.

In Colombia, they frequently say amanecer to mean to spend the night somewhere. Actually, I never heard this in Bogotá, but I heard it constantly in Medellín. Maybe it’s used in Bogotá as well, but I never noticed it. Although I lived in a more or less central part of Medellín, on the weekends I’d often go to Bello, a municipality to the north. Once it got late, the question was always whether to amanecer or not to amanecer; to just stay the night at the family’s house or head all the way back. I can’t find a single citation of this usage online, but I know it’s common in Colombia. Anywhere else? I love that rather than focusing on where you spend the night and perhaps using atardecer or anochecer, this usage instead focuses on where you spend the dawn. Mom, can I spend the dawn with Amy? Perhaps instead of a slumber party, we’d call it an awakening party. What’s better– to fall asleep by a lover’s side, or to wake up next to them? Which should we emphasize? Isn’t language rich? Living in Colombia and inhabiting this beautiful Spanish, I felt like I lived in a poem.

El sábado decidí amanecer en casa de mi familia, pues se me hizo tarde, además también estaba lloviendo.

On Saturday I decided to stay the night at my family’s house because it was getting late, and on top of that it was raining.

Voy a amanecer donde mi tía la noche antes del matrimonio.

I’m going to stay at my aunt’s place the night before the wedding.

Amanece, quédate a mi lado toda la noche hasta que llegue el día, reina de mi vida. (Doctor Krapula- Colombian band)

Stay the night, stay by my side all night long until day comes, my queen.

Image by olgaberrios from Flickr Creative Commons

Amanecer muerto is a way of saying that someone was found dead in the morning. Maybe they died in their sleep, or maybe they passed away in a less peaceful manner. It’s now lights out for them.

One must-know phrase–at least in Colombia and, it appears, Venezuela–is this one: amanecerá y veremos. Literally, it will dawn and we’ll see. Figuratively, pretty much the same. Tomorrow will come and then we’ll see. Let’s wait and see. Only time can tell. Seeing is believing. Amanecerá y veremos can be an innocent enough phrase that merely indicates that there’s no point in stressing out and that we’ll know the answers to our questions soon. It can also be a synonym, though, of a cynical attitude of indifference and apathy. Sort of a, Harumph! Oh yeah? Such and such politician said they’d do that? Time will tell, I guess, but I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you. It’s like an eye roll and a shrug, transcribed.

When checking in new patients at work, we have to ask them a litany of questions, one of which is something like, “Is there anyone in your life who threatens or abuses you?” (¿Hay alguien en su vida que le amenace o lo maltrate?) I always mentally trip over threaten, though, and have to sort through in a nanosecond whether it’s amenazar or amanecer, amenace or amanece (amanezca). Is there anyone in your life who dawns you? Would you like there to be? I know I would.

In case you were wondering, you can’t use amanecer to express that something dawned on you. If you have an aha moment, you’ll want to say se me ocurrió or caí en la cuenta.

So, do you concur with me that amanecer is as beautiful and fascinating word as what it describes? Definitely as worth it to learn as an amanecer is worth waking up early for.

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Posted in Greetings, Phrases, Pronunciation, Sounding Polite, Time, Useful Constructions, Verbs, Weather

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Rocío

Posted on January 20, 2013 | 10 Comments

Yesterday I learned something very cool. I went to a state park with a group of friends, a park that has the highest waterfall east of the Rockies. Here’s a picture from our trip.

740085_552438441435070_1142141568_o

We were a very diverse group: several Americans, a Russian, a Lebanese, a Macedonian, I brought my Argentinian friend, the honorary Colombian (guess who?), and another friend who could easily be an honorary Frenchman. My kind of people!

Hiking down to the bottom of the waterfall, we lingered for a while to be either drenched or lightly misted (depending on how close you got) by the immense spray of the waterfall. It was beautiful. As we hiked back up, I realized that I didn’t know how to refer to a waterfall’s mist in Spanish, and I desperately wanted to know, so I asked my friend Angela.

How would you say a waterfall’s mist in Spanish? (or its spray–I guess the spray kind of creates the appearance of mist)

Rocío 

Ahhh. How interesting. I knew that rocío was the morning dew you find on the grass, but I didn’t know that it’s still rocío when it’s in the air. Well, at least when you’re talking about waterfalls.

Angela didn’t know either translation for rocío, so I first taught her dew. “Like Mountain Dew.” Then I taught her mist. “Like Sierra Mist.” And then my mind was boggled. Me quedé anonadada. 

Mountain Dew! Sierra Mist! ¡Rocío de la montaña! ¡Rocío de la sierra! (las montañas) I had never even realized before that these two drinks have almost the exact same name. As they’d say in Colombia, ¡es la misma vaina! I wonder if Spanish speakers ever confuse them, calling them Mountain Mist and Sierra Dew.

From a Spanish perspective, we’re talking about the exact same thing: rocío. What do you want, rocío from the mountain or rocío from the sierra, the mountain range? Either way, it’s rocío. For one, though, we scraped it off the grass; for the other, we trapped it in the air. Although both drinks are owned by PepsiCo, Mountain Dew has been around since the 1940s, whereas Sierra Mist has been around for less than twenty years. I guess it should be obvious, then, which one was the copión.

Again, I know that as far as a waterfall goes, rocío is more like the spray (which creates the mist). Mist was the only word that occurred to me in the moment, though. The mist you would find on a sierra would be called neblina. So, the soda equivalency is a tad traído por los cabellos, but just let me have it, OK?

To continue the theme . . . yes, neblina is mist, and you probably already know that fog is niebla or bruma. One of the first books in Spanish that I’m going to read this year is Miguel de Unamuno’s Niebla, but I see that its English translation is titled Mist. I guess the idea of mist is much more poetic than mere fog.

Of course, Rocío is a common name for women in Spanish. I remember that my best friend had an Iranian roommate in college named Shabnam, and I remember her telling me that her name meant dew. In fact, names meaning dew are common in many languages. I wonder if Dew was ever a popular name in English? Or how about Mist? There’s Misty, I guess. Foggy? Fog for a boy? OK, now your blogger is just being gratuitously curious to give herself a good laugh. Forgive her. I would never use it myself, but I could see Neblina being a pretty name for a girl in Spanish. Oh, the possibilities!

Finally, how do you say waterfall in Spanish? I hiked to one in Colombia as well, and the only words I could remember yesterday were salto and catarata. I knew there was another one–a better one–but it wasn’t coming to me. Cascada! Ah, yes. Of course. I love how cascade and cataract–two words for waterfall that you usually only see in old poetry–are still very much preserved in Spanish.

Rocío, niebla, neblina, bruma– are you good at keeping them all straight? Did you know about rocío‘s double life? What did you learn this weekend? Where did you go? Tell me about something new you did with your Spanish (or English).

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Posted in Books, Food, Nuances, Weather

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Bochorno

Posted on November 7, 2011 | 2 Comments

If you were none the wiser, you could probably stare at or listen to this word all day and not come close to guessing its meaning. Bochorno. So strange, so decidedly unmellifluous, so deadpan. Thank God, then, for context.  Even better, hand gestures. Although if assailed by this word on a blank page in an enclosed room you’d be hopelessly at sea, when you hear a real person say Qué bochorno in the appropriate moment you’ll intuitively grasp what it means. Why? Because they’ll do this: Grab their shirt at the neckline with two fingers and pull it out a few times, maybe accompanied by light panting. Ah, yes. You too were beginning to feel the oppressive heat, beads of sweat inconveniently accumulating on your brow. Quite right, neighbor. Qué bochorno, indeed.

Bochorno = mugginess, humidity, stifling heat. When it’s sticky, steamy, and stuffy. Heat you could cut with a knife. I think you get the (fogged-up) picture.

Like other weather expressions, you can say that hace bochorno or simply indignantly point it out with qué bochorno! The adjective form of the word is bochornoso, but it’s not used nearly as often as the noun form. Besides, it’s quite the mouthful, don’t you think? Let’s avoid those as much as we can.

It bears mentioning that bochorno can also mean shame or embarrassment (which provides us with the verb abochornar). When I first learned the word about a year and a half ago, the person pointed this out, but I think more as an interesting aside, a nerdy tidbit. From what I can gather, it’s rather old-fashioned, the sort of thing a grandparent would say or that you might read in literature. If you have grandkids and want to use this second meaning, I say go for it. Fancy yourself still youthful? Stick to humidity. Sr. Vocabat insists it’s the only way the word’s normally used round these parts.

If you’re the kind who looks for mnemonics to remember words, maybe you’ll jump on the -horno part of the word, associating the sensation with what it must feel like in an oven (though a sauna would be a bit more accurate). Whatever you do, put it away in a handy place and be ready to whip it out the next time you start to feel “hot as a mink in Africa.” (Reynolds Price)

¡Qué bochorno está haciendo! Pongamos el ventilador.

It’s so humid in here! Let’s turn on the fan.

Ayer estaba haciendo un bochorno, casi me muero del calor.

Yesterday it was so hot I almost died.

_________________________________________________ Non-natives, what’s your experience with this word? Had you heard it before? How have you heard it used? Where? If you’re a native Spanish speaker, anything to correct, clarify, comment on or concur with?

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Posted in Weather

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Escampar

Posted on October 20, 2011 | 5 Comments

In my last post, I said that puentes are part and parcel of the reality here. That got me thinking–what else is ever-present in this country? I had my answer pretty quickly: rain. When I lived in Bogotá, rain was a constant, and it mostly kept me housebound. Bleak skies coupled with the prospects of soaked shoes, squishy feet, and being crowded up against thousands of other shivering rats on public transport effectively killed most of my desires to be social. Here in Medellín, it’s much sunnier, but we’re entering the rainy season, and it turns out that even the City of Eternal Spring isn’t immune from its share of deluges. What to do when it starts to pour down? Escampar, quick!

According to the RAE, it comes from es + campo, dejar el campo. Leave the field. So, you’re picking lettuce, the sky darkens, fat raindrops start pummeling you, and what do you do? You run for cover. That’s one of the meanings of escampar– to take shelter during a storm. A sort of temporary camping out, if you will, to stay dry. If you’re in the street, you duck into a sidewalk café and sip a tinto while you wait for it to escampar. Oh, and here we are at the second usage of the verb–escampar also means to stop raining, to clear up. Pretty nifty, huh? I love learning words we don’t have any exact translation for in English. I guess I’m a little patas arriba today because I really should have introduced that second definition first, seeing as it’s almost universally used, whereas the seeking shelter one is regional (Colombia, Venezuela, and Central America, according to my sources). Do forgive.

So, escampar more generally means to stop raining. Colombian skies, Spanish skies, Argentinian skies…

And escampar also means in some countries to take cover while it’s raining.

I like how the word seems kind of like a sneaky combination of escape and scamper, don’t you?

Cayó un aguacero y pasó casi una hora antes de que escampara.

It started to pour, and it went on for almost an hour before it finally let up.

Uy, está lloviendo mucho, escampemos en la cafetería, de lo contrario terminaremos empapados.

Man, it’s raining hard–let’s wait out the storm in the cafeteria. Otherwise we’ll get totally soaked.

__________________________________________________ Non-natives, what’s your experience with this word? Had you heard it before? How have you heard it used? Where? If you’re a native Spanish speaker, anything to correct, clarify, comment on or concur with? 

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Posted in Verbs, Weather

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