Under the Romans, Hispania was divided into three provinces: Lusitania (now Portugal and Extremadura), Hispania Tarraconensis in the north and north-west (capital was Tarraco, now Tarragona), and Hispania Baetica in the south.  Betis was what the Romans called the Guadalquivir river.  And Real Betis Balompié is one of Seville’s first division football teams (the other is Sevilla FC). Interestingly ‘balompié’ is the literal Spanish translation of ‘football’ as opposed to the anglicism ‘fútbol.’  More about the word balompié in the book.

However, I couldn’t help thinking that, by watching the match live rather than on TV, we were missing out on one of the most entertaining aspects of watching football in Spain – the commentary. Not even the most excitable of English commentators can compete with the pure enthusiasm and lung capacity of any one of his Spanish counterparts. A goal of any kind, even when it is fairly unimpressive or unlikely to affect the result of the match, is greeted with an unbelievably long shout of “Goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool” that always leaves me unsure whether to laugh at its ridiculousness or marvel at the commentator’s ability to keep it going so long. Even more impressively, said commentator then proceeds, with some mysterious secret reserve of breath, to give a fast-paced and highly enthusiastic description of the goal. I’m quite intrigued to know how the comenteristas got on with this particular match, which saw 5 goals in 21 minutes. I suspect they’d barely finished announcing one goal when the next was scored.

Still, despite the overly-long amount of time devoted to one three-letter word, football commentators have probably taught me more Spanish vocabulary than most other programmes on TV, some of which are so bad they verge on the unwatchable. Unfortunately much of this vocab is pretty useless in other areas of life but, considering the importance of the beautiful game in Spanish culture (the country’s most-read newspaper is devoted entirely to sport, mainly football) it can come up in conversation quite often. So, in true In the Garlic style, here’s a quick rundown of the Spanish words you really need to know.

Gol is pretty easy to remember, even if, written down, it appears to be missing a letter. From this you get other terms such as the augmentative golazo (a really great goal), goleador (goalscorer) and the verb golear (to thrash, i.e. score a lot of goals against). In a similar way, it’s not difficult to work out the meaning of fútbol, though this odd-looking attempt to apply Spanish orthographic rules to an English borrowing is only used to describe the game and not the ball itself, which is a balón. Other self-explanatory terms include penalti and córner (though the latter is also known as a saca de esquina) while less obvious but still important are equipo (team) falta (foul), portero (goalie) and árbitro (referee). Best of all though, in my opinion, is el crack. Though this might sound like a Class A drug (and does in fact also have this meaning) it is used in football terms to describe a team’s star player. So, for example, Messi might be described as el crack del Barça.

These terms, along with a good mixture of your favourite Spanish swearwords and a large dose of vociferous enthusiasm are just about all you need to get fully involved in watching a match at a local bar. The only thing left to do is order yourself a beer, and if you’re struggling with that then see the next post.

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.

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.

Published by Maroma Press

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).

<a href=”“>

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.