Telling porkies

There is no rhyming slang in Spanish, although older Spaniards remain fond of rhyming phrases.  So you’ll still hear outdated stuff like ¡te he visto Evaristo! on noticing someone doing something they shouldn’t.

There is nothing resembling porkies (pork pies) for fibs or lies.  This is a new addition to classic cockney terms like titfer (tit for tat) for hat and is looked down on by purists.  But you can’t hold back the tide and cockney has travelled downriver and evolved into Estuary mockney.

A translated porky is una mentirijlla if little and white but una mentira when a whopper.  An exclaimed ¡mentira! is a handy one-word rejection or contradiction of what someone tells you or wants you to believe.

Another’s selfishness, political beliefs, table manners or even occupation can prompt a reaction of pig! in English, pronounced with varying degrees of vehemence and virulence.  The Spanish match and easily overtake English-speakers for vehemence and virulence although they leave pigs out of it and prefer the more generic ¡animal!

But language now travels as far as humans do, so you do now find pigs in English-speaking situations.

In the past, though, exclamations of ¡cerdo! or ¡cochino! (which still means pig) usually occurred in connection with the amount of food shovelled into an ill-mannered mouth.  Cochino could - and still can - express moralising condemnation, particularly where sex is concerned.   Marrano is another option, little used now except by elderly pig-breeders or as an epithet.

So una cerda can label a woman no-one wants to invite to lunch but more often this is the bristle (originally from a pig) found in a tooth- or paint-brush.   

In south-east Spain where I live, rural families used to keep a pig.  It provided sausages and lard (yes, lard – it’s not all olive oil in the Mediterranean) as well manure as fertiliser for the fruit and vegetables that most earned a living from, pre-tourism and pre-building boom.  

Some families still grow their own fruit and vegetables

The pig would be fattened and slaughtered, and most of it used up one way or another over the coming year, including the bristles.

English-speakers throw pearls before the swine but what the Spanish waste on philistines and the unappreciative are daisies: tirar margaritas a cerdos.  This is because a Spanish word margarita - like an English-speaker’s marguerite – has a Greek root, so something has clearly been lost in translation here.  Either way, Spanish pigs get the best of the bargain and are thrown daisies.

Little piggies – cerditos don’t go to market in Spanish nursery rhymes.  Instead infant fingers, not toes, are tweaked in the one below, starting with the little finger and ending with the thumb:

Cinco lobitos tiene la loba

Este fue a por leche
este le ayudó
este se encontró un huevo

este lo frio
y este gordito, gordito se lo comió todito!

Mother wolf has five little cubs

This one went for milk

This one helped her

This one found an egg

This one fried it

And this little fat one ate it all up

This is closer to the English version, but the following version is even more popular:

Cinco lobitos tiene la loba,
Cinco lobitos, detrás de la escoba.
Cinco lobitos,

Cinco parió,
Cinco críó,
Ya los cinco,
A los cinco
Tetita les dió.

Mother wolf has five little cubs,

Five little cubs behind the broom

Five little cubs, five, she had

And she fed and she nursed them all.

Outside nursery rhymes, a wolf-cub is un lobezno but there are no wildlife comparisons for a male wolf or seducer. He is called un ligón in Spanish but be prepared also to meet una ligona, who neither looks nor acts like Mother Wolf.