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.

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.

(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].)

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!)

What a fun word to say; so much more fun than boring old “boil.” I’ve researched the topic some more, and apparently forúnculo is a much more common variant. There are also some less precise ways out there to refer to one.

The word is fun to say because it’s an esdrújula, because it has that stressed unc syllable (like avuncular in English–such a great word), and because, ahem, it has the word culo in it, which makes it especially fitting if the boil is on your derriere. I made up a squeaky-clean alternative–forúncola–for piano leg-covering Victorian types. 

The word “furuncle” also exists in English. If you’d ever heard that, though, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.

Thinking about forúnculo, I remembered the word funicular. The English word is the same, but I’ve only experienced this word in Spanish, namely in Bogotá to get up to the Monserrate mountain. It’s a cable railway that uses tram-like cars to get up a steep slope. There’s a tongue twister shaping up in my mind; here, say this five times fast:

A Florencio no le funciona el forúnculo en el funicular.

Ahhh, and now you see how a medical interpreter decompresses after a long day at work. What do you do?

Get it? A man . . . amanecer. Ahhhhh, ya caigo. We see what you did there, Vocabat. Nothing ingenious–I know–but not too shabby either, right?

Now, back to the phrase of the day: ¿Te lo explico con plastilina? Plastilina is putty-like modeling clay. Its official translation to English is Plasticine®, but I’d never heard that word before. I guess I should have, though. Plasticine is what clay animation features like Wallace and Gromit, and Gumby are made with. There’s also a reference to Plasticine in the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

Picture yourself on a train in a station,
With Plasticine porters with looking-glass ties.

In Spanish, the word plastilina is also frequently used for Play-Doh, even though there’s a world of a difference to the discerning fingers and noses of children. Play-Doh has a base of flour, salt, and water; is totally edible; and it hardens. Plasticine, on the other hand, is derived from clay and is oil-based. It’s not edible, and it never gets hard. In some countries Play-Doh is known as just that: Play-Doh. 

Explicar algo con plastilina, then, means to have to explain things in very basic terms to those who might be a little slow on the uptake. To put things so simply that even a child could understand. It’s like when we say, Do you want me to draw you a picture? in English, though you can also say ¿Te lo dibujo? in Spanish.

It appears that explicar algo con plastilina is a Colombian phrase, with possibly some usage in Venezuela as well. Thanks to the internet, I now possess an equivalent phrase: it looks like explicar algo con manzanas expresses the same idea in some other countries. Personally, if I was having trouble grasping something–say, how the Federal Reserve works–I’d much rather have it explained to me via Play-Doh than apples. More power to you, though, if you could look at the cross-section of an apple and instantly understand monetary policy.

Ese tipo no entiende que no quiero nada con él, toca explicarle con plastilina.

That guy just doesn’t get that I’m not interested in him; you have to come out and make everything so obvious to him.

¿Quedó claro o tocará explicarte con plastilina?

Does that make sense, or do I need to dumb it down for you?

Bob Willey explica con plastilina el posmodernismo.

Bob Willey explains postmodernism to us in layman’s terms.

I learned this phrase in Bogotá from my friend Carolina, who currently lives in Tokyo. She grew up in the U.S., and she had a time of it trying to learn Spanish when she moved to Colombia 10+ years ago. She told me that she would have to ask ¿Cómo? ¿Cómo? ¿Cómo? so many times that her friends would gently tease her and say, ¿Te lo explicamos con plastilina? In anticipation of these insincere, smart-aleck offers, I would love to carry around a small tub of Play-Doh in my purse. Then, when I inevitably draw a blank at some point in a conversation, I could take out the Play-Doh, hand it to the other person, and say, ¿Dizque guarilaque? Qué pena, pero no sé qué demonios querrá decir eso. ¿Será que me lo puedes explicar con plastilina? Or when they say, ¿En serio que no sabes qué significa eso? ¿Te lo explico con plastilina?, I’d whip it out and say, Bien pueda. Hágale. Their expression would be so priceless.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve never called anything my boyfriend except, well, boyfriends, but if I absolutely had to think of a runner-up who vies for my affection, the choice would be as plain as the nose on my face: that’s right, Spanish. Don’t tell me you can’t see that I’m head over heels in love with him. If this blog isn’t an ongoing love letter to the Spanish language, what is? Anyone who knows me would tell you that I’m inordinately, passionately, obsessively enamored of Spanish. And I have been for almost two decades now. My true love–surprise, surprise–is Colombian Spanish. Yeah yeah, so I once wrote a post about breaking up with Colombian Spanish (it’s called metonymy, folks), but I didn’t mean it for a second–Colombian Spanish and I are still thick as thieves. So, yes, until I find another half orange (a media naranja), it’s Spanish that’s the one and only apple of my eye. If you’re smitten with Spanish like I am, surely you joined me and the rest of the Spanish-speaking world today in celebrating el Día del Idioma– Language Day. ¡Un brindis por el castellano!

How do I love thee, Spanish? Well, I’ve been blogging the ways for over a year and a half now, 120 posts and counting. You all know that I’m anti-cursi, so don’t expect any blubbering professions of adoration or a bathtub filled with rose petals from me. I’ll just say this: With every fiber in me, I truly love, love, love speaking, listening to, reading and writing in Spanish.  In Spanish, I see everything color de rosa, and that’s just the way I like it. Spoken like a true tortolito, of course. I don’t even care how ridiculous I probably sound right now. I become a blabbering, yammering fool with a huge gleam in my eye when I talk about Spanish, and I’ll blabber and yammer to my heart’s content.

Back to el Día del Idioma–The Día del Idioma is generally celebrated April 23 because on this day Cervantes–the famed author of Don Quijote–died. The comic above imagines that if he were still around to see how Spanish has been “perverted” through chat services like MSN Messenger, he’d have some harsh words. I guess nobody ever told him not to shoot the messenger–like it’s his fault people type on there as if they’d declared an all-out war on proper spelling and grammar. If only he could chill out and realize that Spanish is still as groovy as ever. If Cervantes met someone like me, he’d probably be moved to tears by my passion for his language. I’d have to do my best to keep the fact that I still haven’t read Don Quijote under wraps, though. Whoops. It’s at the top of my to-read list, I swear.

Anyone else out there who will confess to loving Spanish beyond all reasonable limits? What are people like us to do? Well, a very happy Language Day to everyone! Happy Spanishing.

Do not wear bahamas clothing, this place is cold (9K feet altitude) and do not search for coconuts (this is not a tropical island).

Sadly, I’m sure this needed to be said. You just know there have been Americans who have caught a taxi from the airport and asked to be taken to the beach. I hope that once they got over their disappointment they had fun in what the article calls “the Hollywood of South America.” (Which of these lines is funnier? Hmm.)

Narciso–what a name! Narcissus, naturally. Can you even imagine having this name? Or choosing it for your child? Or dating someone named Narciso? I sure can’t. I have never, ever, ever heard of anyone named Narcissus, but it looks like a few are out there. Would you just get used to the name over time? Yo, Narcissus! It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. It would be like being named Pegasus or Sisyphus–who could really say your name without thinking of your mythological namesake? Any time you’d say your name, eyebrows would go up and then you’d have to quickly assure people that no, there’s no connection with, ahem, your infamous homonym. It’s pure coincidence that you have the exact same name as literature’s most well-known egomaniac. Desperate to prove that your name is just a name and nothing more, you don’t even have any mirrors in your house. You also take great pains to make sure you’re never spotted lingering around pools of water.

Once I saw that there was a patient named Narciso on my schedule, my curiosity was piqued. I couldn’t wait to meet him in order to see just what a Narciso looks like. It turned out, though, that he had arrived early, seen the doctor, and already left by the time I showed up. Drat! My one chance to meet a real live Narciso had been smashed to smithereens. Talk about an anticlimax.

I finished my morning appointments, went to the library and read, had lunch with a friend, and then was given a last-minute appointment in the afternoon. This patient was named José, and, long story short, I just so happened to find out that his full name was José Narciso. My jaw dropped. Narciso again? What were the odds? He told me that his mom had chosen his name from the calendar. Apparently, for each day of the year, there’s a different name. José was the name for the day he was born on, and Narciso was the name of the following day. As simple as that, as if he just as easily could have been named José Glotón or José Malandro if those pejoratives had appeared on that day instead. He knew the story of Narcissus, but he confessed that he wished that he was a little more like his tocayo who, as he understood it, was tall and handsome. Instead, he lamented, he was chaparro and feo. We had a good laugh about it. I told him that I’m sure his wife thinks he’s the most attractive man in the world and that the only thing that matters is that he’s perfect for her. It’s all about inner beauty, anyway–all the rest withers and fades. He didn’t know about the original Narcissus’ sordid treatment of poor Echo, so I gently broke it to him. Let me tell you, it’s not every day that I discuss Greek mythology with patients. Not even every week.

Ayyyyy . . . how I love my job. Once I move on, I’ll definitely look back and miss these exquisite moments of intimacy that I share with strangers day in and day out. I may be just squeaking by financially and not nearly as stimulated as I could be mentally, but I have to say that interpreting has been so nourishing for my soul and spirit this past year. I hope that you also had at least one moment–if not several–of delight, surprise, and fun at work today.

I couldn’t resist coming up with a Spanish version of yesterday’s comic.

There are many different kinds of errors we could look at, but lately I’ve been thinking about verb conjugations. Here are three examples that come to mind.

I went to a bachata festival in another city this weekend, and naturally I got to meet people from all over and speak a lot of Spanish. I met a guy from Spain named Gonzalo, and at one point I was telling him that someone didn’t satisfy me. Although we’d been speaking for several hours in Spanish without a hitch, I struggled to conjugate satisfacer in the preterite. ¿No me satisfació? ¿No me satisfajo? ¿No me satisfizo? With that last guess, satisfizo, I was half-joking, sure that there was no way it was actually that. Gonzalo wasn’t any help, either. Neither of us had the slightest idea, so for the sake of efficiency we decided to just say No me dejó satisfecha and leave it that. Good grief. Now that I’m back home and have looked it up, I see that it is satisfizo after all. Color me surprised, but I guess I shouldn’t be. I knew that satisfago is the first person present tense conjugation of satisfacer, so it makes sense that it mimics hacer‘s conjugations. I’ll make sure I have satisfizo at the ready the next time, though I have the feeling I’m going to sound like a pedantic little ñoña when I say it.

I also remember two language doubts that came up when I was in Colombia last summer. One time, I was with a large group of friends in Bogotá– there were probably about 40 people there. The person talking, Alejo, said something like, “I want us all to add something.” Quiero que todos añadamos algo. And then he wondered out loud if he’d said it correctly, commenting on how weird and wrong añadamos sounded. The room broke out into a linguistic shouting match, everyone taking sides. I think many people, perhaps even most, concurred that it sounded wrong, and thus couldn’t be right. Of course, it was right. If there’s one thing a half-fluent gringa can offer to a room full of native speakers, it’s hyper-correct Spanish (often to a fault).

Another time on that same visit, I was talking to my friend Fanny in Bogotá and asking for advice. She said to me, Yo solo sé que de lo único que nos vamos a arrepentir al final de nuestras vidas es de las cosas que no hicimos, que no intentamos y que no dijimos. I just know that the only thing we’re going to regret at the end of our lives are the things we didn’t do, didn’t attempt, and didn’t say. And I must have responded by saying something like, Yes, when we die . . . Sí, cuando nos muramos . . . I had to interrupt myself, though, and ask if that was how you say it. She wasn’t sure. We knit our brows, pursed our lips, and scratched our heads for a bit, only to give up. It seemed like it had to be right, but it sounded so strange. I asked my friends Lorena and Claudia about it later on, and neither of them was sure either. They both majored in philology and now work as teachers. So much for native speakers speaking perfectly. If they can’t be bothered, why should you? In the same way, I’ve never known if it’s swam or swum, hung or hanged, lay or lie, but that doesn’t stop me from speaking English confidently. Stop quibbling and start speaking.

What verbs have you heard native speakers get tripped up by? What verbs make you break out in hives? 

Fui por lana y no salí trasquilada–¡yupi!

How would I say freshly pressed in Spanish? Above, you’ll see my completely non-kosher version, and–don’t worry–I know it’s causing a great deal of consternation, pena ajena, and serious eyebrow-raising regarding my Spanish abilities among my readers. You see, espichar is a super Colombian way of saying to press as in to press a button (oprimir, pulsar). Frescamente . . . pues, obvio. The context is all kinds of wrong, though. This may be the kind of shoddy translation we’ve come to expect from machine translation and second-rate translators who are willing to work practically for free, but hopefully you know by now that you can expect a little more from Vocabat. OK, a lot more!

WordPress would be Prensa palabras, just as we can have a prensa ajos (garlic press). The most literal and succinct translation, then, of Freshly Pressed would be recién prensado. Or recién publicado. Another possibility to connote hot off the press could be con la tinta fresca. The ink hasn’t even dried on this bad boy. The ink is so fresh it glistens. Maybe for online writing we’ll have to tweak it to con los píxels frescos. Got any better suggestions for Freshly Pressed in Spanish? In the name of professionalism and translation integrity, frescamente espichada obviously will not do. Since this award kind of makes me queen for a day, though, I’m going to milk this oh-so-fleeting distinction for all it’s worth and give frescamente espichada the A-OK. Any would-be pedantic quibblers can take it up with me in private.