Tag Archives: Language

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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Forúnculo forúncola

Posted on May 14, 2013 | 4 Comments

My word of the day yesterday was forúnculo. It means a boil, in the medical sense. Also biblical, as in the plague of boils. It became my word of the day when a doctor told me that a patient apparently had a boil on her butt. Ooh, a boil! (Pobrecita.) Never had to say that one before. The word furúnculo flew into my mind from God only knows where, and I was glad to finally activate this word that had lain dormant in my passive vocabulary. I always enjoy that sensation of surprise, panic, and ultimately triumph when I have to shuffle through my mental papers like a madwoman to locate a word, especially if it’s a word I’ve never had the pleasure of actually saying before. Alas, the word never did come up; the poor thing was suffering from a hemorrhoid instead. I didn’t get to say furúnculo after all, but I was just as glad that she got it taken care of, I promise.

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.

Prick his boil

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?

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Posted in Body, Interpreting, Medical

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¿Te lo explico con plastilina?

Posted on May 5, 2013 | 9 Comments

Did you catch the play on words in my last post’s title? I grilled three friends on it, and none of them got the allusion. Hmm. I’m generally a person devoid of snark, but for the sake of education I’m going to employ some major snark right now and use a Colombian phrase that’s apropos: ¿Te lo explico con plastilina? Should I break it down for you using Play-Doh? Would some clay figures help you get it? Do I need to spell it out for you? Here, see if this helps.

Amanecer for all seasons

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. 

Plastilina

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.

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Posted in Education, Informal, Phrases

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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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Ode to my Spanish boyfriend

Posted on April 23, 2013 | 16 Comments

If Facebook photos are any indication, there are a fair number of men out there whose car (or motorcycle) occupies the position of leading lady in their life. Do you see those pictures too? The ones they post of their hot rods unironically captioned My girl! or My girlfriend with nary a woman in sight. I get car love, kind of. My little Corolla is shiny and winsome and always looks happy to see me. Still, I liked the buses, taxis, metro and old-fashioned walking in Colombia far better. 

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!

I love Spanish

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.

Día del idioma

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.

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Posted in Holidays, Love, Personal

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