The Taming of the Musaraña

 

Anyone looking distracted or disconnected with their surroundings is routinely rebuked estás mirando las musarañas which is approximate to you’re daydreaming or you’re off with the fairies.  It really means you’re looking at the shrews because una musaraña is the Spanish for shrew, which is easily traced to the Latin mus araneus, literally spider mouse, because its bite was once believed to be as venomous as a spider’s. 

English-speakers bestow the name of this small but formidable rodent – roedor on a human shrew or scold.  Typically and unfairly this will always be female, a type who occurs as frequently in Spain as anywhere else although there is no direct translation for her, so Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew becomes La Fierecilla Domada (The wild animal tamed). 

Una arpia – a harpy just about fits the bill, likewise una bruja – witch although neither conveys the correct degree of shrewishness and it’s worth remembering that the Spanish often use witch where we use bitch when not meaning a female dog.  Cascarrabias has the right level of ill humour but is more appropriate for a male grouch.

Una musaraña is an outdoors creature, as is una rata or rat although people who know about these things differentiate between una rata de campo – a field rat and the grey rata de alcantarilla – sewer rat.  Used as an adjective – él es muy rata, for instance – it acquires the meaning of stingy, mean.

Suffixes in Spanish tend to enlarge or diminish so you’d be forgiven for expecting un ratón to be a big rat but instead this is a mouse although, as elsewhere, a Spanish ratón also leads an important double existence as a computer mouse.  There is also more than one side to una ratonera which as well as a mouse trap is also a mousehole, a mouse den and, when applied to a human habitation, a dive or dump as well. 

Un ratoncito, as the diminutive suggests, is a small mouse, as good an excuse as any other for introducing Ratoncito Pérez, the little mouse with a surname who, like the Tooth Fairy in English-speaking countries, leaves money in exchange for a milk tooth – diente de leche whenever he finds one beneath a child’s pillow.