An everyday story of country folk

Peasant! is a tried and true insult amongst English-speakers and although ¡campesino! is not a tried and true Spanish insult, some urban Spaniards would not take it as a compliment.   Others might look puzzled and explain that they’re not from the country as it happens. In deepest Spain a chicken or two may still scratch around back doors but there is no shame and a fair amount of pride attached to being a campesino or countryman.



Being a country person is a matter of pride



Un campesino lives in, on or off the countryside – el campo, a word now so popular with foreign residents of all nationalities that they also use it in their own language. 

Another translation, labrador, is still a matter of pride in older people and, once again, provides little in the way of an insults. 

Un paisano is another peasant-sounding word you’d be forgiven for translating as countryman, but in practice it is nearer to fellow countryman and used by a Spaniard for anyone from his own neck of the woods. 

Paisano also indicates mufti, plain clothes so un militar vestido de paisano is an out-of-uniform soldier and un agente de paisano is a plainclothes policeman.

Intended barbs are more likely to hit home with gañán, paleto, cateto or hortera and with the first three we get there at last with words conveying identical scorn to an English-speaker’s peasant!

The original meaning of gañán was farmhand and the first entry in the Diccionario de la Lengua Española for un cateto is geometrical: either of the sides enclosing the right-angle in a right-angled triangle.  The second is a noncommittal villager followed by yokel, another insult favoured by city-dwellers. 

To be called un paleto is equally unflattering, as this implies a yokel or bumpkin who earns a living digging fields or shovelling manure with una pala – a spade.

When meant to offend, these three nouns have feminine versions - gañana, paleta, cateta – but hortera is both an adjective and noun.

Nominally the adjective means anything or anyone from la huerta – cultivated land or a market garden but these days hortera only ever means flashy, tacky, tasteless.  And things don’t get any better because un hortera or una hortera implies peasant of the unappreciated type.

La Huerta with capital letters refers to the intermittently fertile area stretching from Valencia to Murcia which was responsible for much of that area’s wealth before tourism.  To the urban poor as well as more austere and less prosperous inland farmers this affluence was too often manifested by ostentatious bad taste, which to this day continues to be described as hortera.

In the past when a Spaniard succeeded in making large amounts of money he – virtually never she – endeavoured to merge himself and his family into the landscape by living and behaving like the established, unostentatious gentry. 

Thankfully wealth is now more widely distributed and good taste is no longer a privilege of the privileged so being labelled un hortera or una hortera still hurts, not for being termed a peasant but for being considered a vulgar peasant.

Putting on an accent

The Spanish are as class-conscious as anybody else, although when they speak you won’t always be able to tell which kind of school they went to or how they hold a knife.  In Spain, an accent tells you where a person lives or comes from. So a marquis born, bred and resident in a certain region tends to retain that region’s accent, instead of having it ironed out once he stops playing with the housekeeper’s children. 

Tone, volume of voice and vocabulary indicate whether a Spaniard is what is described as “educated” regardless of his or her level of education, and whether he or she is socially acceptable and/or well-off into the bargain.

The other type of accent perches over a word but both are called un acento although the grammatical type is known as una tilde, a word which also covers ~, that most Spanish of symbols.

Unless you write much Spanish accents are low priority but there are occasions when adding an accent gives a word another meaning, beginning with más which means more. 

An accentless mas means although or but (and don’t expect to hear it as often as aunque or pero): quiero otro gato, mas sé que no debo – I want another cat although I know I shouldn’t. 

Solo means alone but an accent turns this into only:  le gusta vivir solo – he likes living alone but sólo le gustan los perros – he only likes dogs.  You can forget this particular accent if you want, because new language rules thrashed out in Guadalajara (Mexico) last November consigned it to the grammatical scrapheap by making it optional.

Porque corresponds to because: come porque tiene hambre – he eats because he’s hungry although this word can prove elliptical for newcomers, as Spanish thought patterns continue to regard porque as because even though an English-speaker will translate it as why in no sé porque tiene hambre – I don’t know why he’s hungry.

An accented el porqué is a noun meaning reason: el porqué de su enfado – the reason for his anger.

Devoid of an accent, por que is roughly equivalent to through which, for which or because of which, although it’s not a much-used construction in Spanish and amounts to the same thing as an English why: esa fue el motivo por que lo echaron – that was the reason why they threw him out. 

Sandwiched between question marks and wearing an accent, ¿por qué? is a questioning why: ¿por qué te gustan los gatos? – why do you like cats? 

All of which can be confusing although the Spanish see the differences, not the similarities between these four, not unlike a mother with quads.

 

Té, quiero

Native-born Spanish speakers will tell you that accents matter only at school and in business letters but although this sounds suspiciously like the contempt that familiarity breeds, accents may be something you don’t have to worry about too much.  But it’s still handy to be aware of the potential emotional upheavals resulting from not knowing te quiero means I love you but writing té quiero gets you tea.