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.