Euros, turkeys and bucks

Like everywhere else in the world half of the ads on TV in Spain are for cars. The other day I was doing my usual mental absence of leave act when I became vaguely aware of a bunch of turkeys on the screen and a voice-over going on about how you could have the all-singing (well, talking), all-parking, all-navigatiing, what-do-you-need a-driving licence-for coche fantastico for just 50 pavos a month. Fifty pavos. A play on words. Pavos are turkeys and, until recently, they were also slang for American dollars – in other words, bucks. Well, they still are. But now the term has been co-opted for euros too.

It was only a matter of time. When we said adios to the peseta back in 2002, we also said goodbye to a whole bunch of peseta-specific slang. Some have hung on: estar sin un duro literally means to be without one of the old five-peseta coins, but is still everyone’s favourite stony-broke expression. But no-one ever talks about talegos (1000 peseta bills) any more, and only those over sixty (?) still understand that mil duros = 10,000 pesetas = God knows how many euros.

For a while it seemed euros would stay boringly euros. Then came euracas, eurillos and euritos. Euracas didn’t really catch on, but eurillos and euritos – which makes the damn things sound quite cute and friendly – are here to stay. Along with pavos, it seems. I’ve also heard or read – slight variations here – leuros, leuritos, lerus and aurelios. Oh, and bin ladens are 500-euro notes: we all know they exist but no-one’s ever seen one ….

Another related bit of euro slang is the term mileurista – someone who manages to earn the princely sum of 1000 euros a month. Depending how you look at it, this is something to aspire to (plenty of full-time workers earn way less than that), or a situation you find yourself in that makes you wish you’d trained to be a mechanic or a plumber or a carpenter rather than taking a five-year arts degree at university.

The word was coined in 2005 in a letter to El País newspaper and soon caught on to describe a new social class. Your average mileurista is 30, a university graduate, possibly with a master’s degree, and speaks at least one foreign language, but earns a salary that is hardly commensurate with his/her qualifications.

To end on a euro note (groan), most of the other Euro-zone countries are busy evolving their own euro slang. In Austria and Germany there’s Teuro – a play on the word ‘teuer’ meaning expensive; in German youth culture – in the plural only - they are Euronen (after a Star Trek Internet spoof introduced a race called Euronen), and in Ireland, don’t know why but sounds great, they are yo-yos.

 

 

 

All You Need Is…

According to Jackie Corley, writer and publisher of WordRiot.org, in an interview featured at the super Absolute Write, with practice, anyone can become a wordsmith. “But it takes something more to be a writer. It takes cajones.”

Yeah, right.

Cojones is the body part of choice used to express such diverse states and activities as literally having balls (guts) (tener cojones), getting up people’s noses (tocar los cojones), sitting around on your butt doing bugger all (tocarse los cojones). And, as we wrote in In The Garlic, the word is probably doomed forever to be muddled by foreigners with cojines (cushions) and cajones (drawers - the furniture). There isn’t a foreign speaker of Spanish in the world who doesn’t have an embarrassing cajón/cojín/cojón tale to tell. (Theresa’s, which involved a Christmas play, a class of kids, and a pile of cushions, is in the book).

So I was both delighted and incredulous to have found a very public written example. But obviously the first interesting point is that the word cojones in its ‘guts’ meaning has entered the English language in the US as a slang term.

I fell about with laughter for a bit. Then I checked out with Wikipedia: cojones was famously used in 1996 by Madeleine Albright, then serving as the USA’s ambassador to the United Nations, in the aftermath of the downing of an Hermanos al Rescate light civilian aircraft by Cuban airforce MiG 29s on 24 February. Following the release of a transcript of radio traffic between the fighter pilots in which one exclaimed, ¡Le partimos los cojones! (”We busted his balls!”), Albright offered the following comment: “Frankly, this is not cojones. This is cowardice.” Albright later described the vulgarism as “the only Spanish word I know”.

Cajones is a very frequent mispelling, and is sometimes used as a euphemism for cojones. An English speaker would pronounce them more or less the same.

Then I googled ‘cajones’. Amongst the websites devoted to ‘wooden box drums’ (a second meaning alongside drawers) was this:

Bush Admires Blair’s “Cajones”

And this: Do “Big Cajones” Help You Succeed in the Stock Market?

Now, to my ears, Big Cajones is beginning to sound like a rather fabulous nickname for a grizzled sidekick in a B movie of a wannabe Steinbeck-esque Great American Novel. Which I’ll be writing myself, cajones permitting.

Preservatería

It may look like a British phone box but it is, in fact, una preservatería, or una tienda de preservativos. No, no, nothing to do with ‘e’ numbers and chemical dyes - that would be conservativos, sorry, I mean conservantes (what a minefield!). What we are talking about here is a ‘condom shop’, a sort of sexy sweetie shop full of multi-coloured, multi-flavoured, multi-textured preservativos or condones. Spotted in Málaga.

Bits of Business

 

The other day I went down the mountain to do some gestiones. Down the mountain. Bit of an exaggeration; Macharaviaya, the village where I live is only 240 metres above sea level, but it’s ten minutes of spiralling downhill bends to get to the coast, so ‘down the mountain’ it is.

Bueno, back to the gestiones. On this occasion, these involved queueing for 15 minutes to send a registered letter at Correos, nipping into the Town Hall to sign an application for a home improvement subsidy, popping into my bank to ask for yet another debit card replacement on account of the magnetic band’s every-decreasing half life, dropping in at the insurance company where I have a plan de jubilación (pension scheme) to see how many millions (ha,ha) I’m due in the unlikely event that both of us are still around in 20 years’ time – and, a trip all the way into Málaga to hand in my three-monthly tax returns to the person who does gestiones for a living: the gestor, the sorter outer of all the bits of running around I haven’t got the time, energy or grey matter to do myself.

A gestión, in case you didn’t know / hadn’t guessed is a sorting out, an administrative or bureaucratic errand, a bit of business. To quote from our book In the Garlic, “Hacer gestiones can range from solving a minor problem with a bank to major negotiations like pulling troops out of Iraq.”

The gestor, on the other hand, is mostly concerned with running around or sending his/her minions to run around on your behalf to obtain official documents, permits, licenses and authorisations. He/She costs good money, but may save you from stress-induced heart attacks in the long run.

Though not necessarily - should your gestor’s office be located in the busiest part of town, where the nearest extortion racket, sorry, municipal car park, is always full, and the adjacent side streets are a mess of one-way, wing mirror-clipping madness.

Luckily, on this particular day, someone actually pulled out of a prime parking space less than 200 metres from the Gestoría. The sun was shining, the pavements were buzzing, and when I handed over my paperwork, it seemed that absolutely all my papeles were in present and correct - that for once, La Ley de ‘falta uno’, The Law of ‘One Missing’ did not apply.

A reward was in order. A nice sunny table on a sidewalk cafe, a copy of that day’s El País newspaper, and a leisurely breakfast - consisting of a sombra doble (large, not-too-strong coffee) and a pitufo (large toasted roll) smothered in fresh tomato pulp and garlic-steeped olive oil. Oh, and a small glass of freshly-squeezed orange juice thrown in for good measure. And all for €2.10.

Well worth a morning’s gestiones. 

Chickens (and their heads)… again

Talking of Spanish chickens (as did we in connection with El Prat airport), did you know that when you buy a chicken at the supermarket, the head is still on it? Had forgotten this detalle of Spanish life, one of the 101 Things They Never Told Us Before We Came To Spain featured at Brighter Spain. Go and read them here. And send in your own for the next 101. Brighter Spain (and Brighter Catalunya) is based near Tortosa in the Baix Ebre and they have some gorgeous holiday accommodation for rent and lots of info about the area.

Between Two Fires

Between Two Fires: Guerrilla War in the Spanish Sierras is a gripping and deeply moving new book about “Spain’s forgotten war” by award-winning journalist David Baird written after five years of painstaking research.

Published by Maroma Press

El Prat

In view of the mega debacle at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 last week, and the chaos last summer at Barcelona’s Aeroport del Prat, we can only wait in trepidation to see what happens when the new Terminal Sur opens in 2009. It’s already behind schedule. According to Aena, the Spanish airport authority, (I translate) “The new terminal building is of a tremendous logistical and technical complexity. It will handle over 100,000 passengers a day and employ over 15,000 people.”

Keep your fingers crossed.

El Prat, by the way, is nothing to do with the British word for a stupid person, but is Catalan for a field or meadow, hinting at the area’s agricultural past. (For all you info junkies/pub quiz writers out there, the town of El Prat del Llobregat has over 60,000 inhabitants and is twinned, endearingly, with Fingal, Ireland, home to Dublin International Airport.) El Prat’s real claim to fame, however, is the El Prat chicken, an autochthonous breed and the only one in Spain to be awarded the European Union’s Indicación Geográfica Protegida. For me the name pollastre del Prat always evokes an image of chickens (possibly headless) flapping and clucking along the main runway. There’s a pile of very very detailed specifications about the colour and texture of feathers, feet, eyes and beak, but all you really need to know is that El Prat chickens and capons are fed a diet of 80% grains and are allowed to live for a minimum of 90 days. Each one (when dead, that is) has a numbered label with the blue and yellow European IGP seal.

Here are live El Prat chickens pecking around (not on the runway though).

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Funcionary: Fall Around Laughing

Does fighting the bureaucrats wear you out?

Do you always have a form missing?

Do you feel lost when applying for government subsidies?

Well now you can practice with the hot new game…

Practice your Spanish while falling around laughing. Here’s a transcript of the original Spanish and an English translation courtesy of In The Garlic.

This hilarious clip is from the ETB (Basque TV) show Vaya Semanita. We’d sure like to see more of it.

And now the shameless plug. Read all about funcionario, burocracia (and burrocracia), desayuno, ventanilla, oposiciones, enchufe and the Ley de Falta Uno in our book In The Garlic. And all the stuff that makes Spain Spain.

Girona: An Armchair Guide

A couple of weeks ago I was in Girona to promote our book In The Garlic. I really like Girona. It’s quieter and more laid back and less built up than Barcelona. But it’s still - I hesitate to use this done-to-death word - vibrant.

I was there for, amongst other things, a meeting of the Girona Grapevine, an English-speaking group that get together every week for coffee in the centre of Girona. After the meeting we had lunch at the Boira restaurant. This looks onto ‘the colourist fluvial facade’ which is ‘the emblem of Girona.’ You know, that picture postcard image of Girona you always see, with the back facades of the buildings reflected in the waters of the Onyar. (Now the Onyar is pretty low. The drought is biting. A painful sight.)

It’s ages since I visited and explored all the wonders that Girona offers, and it’s definitely time to do them all again. But right now I have what I suppose are called ‘health issues’ and for the moment, I can’t do much walking. So this will have to be an armchair tour. Hence the ‘colourist fluvial facade’.

Let me explain.

On the first day, after the train journey from Barcelona, a meeting at the La Llibreteria bookshop and a Japanese lunch, we went back to my friend’s flat on the other side of the Onyar, on the edge of the city. Her living room overlooks the river and from it you can see (parched and dusty) hills and woods.

“There’s always something going on down there,” she said, producing cups of tea. “You see all sorts.” That day dust-covered men in plastic helmets were drilling on the opposite bank. The noise was tremendous. My friend thought they were drilling for water. And then, she said, there was the pig.

Pig?

“Yes. Most afternoons a man comes down to the river and walks a pig on a lead. The first time I saw it I went to clean my glasses. But it’s definitely a pig.”

“So all life is down here by the Onyar. I can blog about that.”

My friend went to her Catalan class. The sun went down. No pig. The men in helmets hit pay dirt - as it were - and suddenly muddy water gushed out of their hole into the river. The water stopped, the men turned off their machine and went away. I put my feet up and studied the tourist map. This only made me want to go out and explore the place even more, but my foot was painful. So vicarious visiting it had to be, in the shape of an oldish Girona City Guide published by Triangle Postals.

As translated guide books go, this one was pretty good. I could go on at length - well, ad nauseam, and then some - about bad translations. In fact I have been going on about bad translations for 25 years, and now, with the internet, it’s even worse. But this guide book made sense, albeit rather quaintly. ‘There is no need to worry about getting lost in the stone labyrinth as Girona has been called,’ it promised, ‘because it is homely labyrinth that never betrays.’ So that’s okay then. On the other hand, ‘The large vaulting of the Cathedral gives a feeling of dizziness.’

But first, a bit of history. ‘In the 2nd half of the 3rd century it was invaded by Franks and Germans resulting in the movement of the walls.’ I can guess what this means but the image that sprang to mind was of the walls themselves growing stick-person legs and wandering around, dazed and confused.

And then, just like our Rambla here in Bcn, ‘The Rambla is the display case of Girona society.’ This is so interesting. In contrast to walls growing legs and moving around, we have the citizen specimens of Girona, fat and thin, old and young, in suits and in jeans, frozen in time and space or maybe even pinned to cards like insects.

But ‘progress,’ warbles the guide book: ‘has often brought with it the disappearance of some or other picturesque corner of the old quarter. It is what politicians call ‘fluffing up’.

I beg your pardon?

The guide is really superb at incongruous word choices. The caption to the de rigueur pic of the buildings on the Onyar says: ‘The river-facing facade is a harmonious hotchpotch of buildings.’

And this made me laugh out loud: ‘A rogue streak of lightning chopped off the bell tower of Sant Feliu.’

Then there are the legends. Other cities have dragons, eagles or lions. Girona has flies. Sant Narcís (Saint Narcissus) is patron of the city. His miracle happened in September 1286, when Girona was beseiged by the French. Even though the city surrendered without a fight, the French behaved abominably: robbing, insulting and oppressing the Gironans, sacking churches and so on. The last straw was when they profaned the body of Sant Narcís and broke one of his arms. Whereupon giant flies issued from his body and stung the French soldiers and their horses, who expired, twitching and writhing and, I daresay, foaming at the mouth.

Sant Narcís, by the way, also protects against flooding and inflammation of the ear.

Blogueo, ergo sum

 

To blog or not to blog. Actually, that isn’t the question. I blog, therefore I am is more like it. It works in Spanish, too. Blogueo, luego existo. Blogueo? Well, there is a word for blog in castellano, sort of – bitácora, from cuaderno de bitácora, meaning log book (you know, “Cuaderno bitácora de Capitan Kirk, fecha estellar ….”), but that’s a whole three syllables longer and a whole lot less flexible than the ultra-economical, ultra-versatile blog. The only snag is that it ends in g and turns into a mangled ‘blogghh’ in the mouths of some speakers. You do get hard g’s in Spanish, but they are always followed by a, o or u; for example, gasolina, gorila, guitara. When followed by an e or an i, the g becomes soft and guttural, as in genio or gigante. Sticking one at the end of a word is just asking for trouble – pronounced according to Spanish spelling rules, dog and blog rhyme with the Scottish ‘loch’.

But that’s ok. Borrowed words from English are always knocked about a bit phonetically and grammatically to make them sound and look more Spanish. To make the verb ‘to blog’, you just add -ear. First we had zapear (to zap), then surfear, (to surf the Net), then chatear (to chat) and now bloguear (to bore everyone with whatever’s on your mind). You have to add the u, by the way, to make the g hard. From there, you get bloguero / bloguera (blogger), the gerund, blogueando, the past participle, blogueado, and just about any other part of speech you care to construct.

So, there you have it. Instead of letting Valerie (my good buddy and co-author of In the Garlic) battle in the blogósfera single-handedly, this reluctant bloguera has finally blogueado her way into existence.

Theresa O’Shea