Chinese Puzzle

China is not what it was.  Or has it remained the same, while the rest of the world has changed? 

This is something of a puzzle in itself and is illustrated by the way that China figures prominently in so many figures of Spanish speech still used by older generations.

Everybody knows that un cuento chino – a Chinese story is a tall story but anyone with few assets and pressing debts will probably be eligible for a free bus pass if they complain tengo más trampas que una pelicula china. Seldom used by the young, it loses its jaunty desperation in translation, sounding nearer to farce than tragedy: I’ve more snares than a Chinese film. 

Cities and large towns in Spain still possess un barrio chino – Chinatown although it will be a red light district rather than a neighbourhood where restaurants serve Peking Duck. 

Less specialised on both counts is tinta china or Indian ink while any work – trabajo involving considerable time and patience is a politically-incorrect – but still undeniably apt - trabajo de chinos.

¡Naranjas de la China! – Chinese oranges! (kumquats, according to some) conveys the same scepticism of that’ll be the day. 

China also possesses a secondary Spanish meaning of fine china or porcelain but the everyday type produced in Staffordshire, for instance, is loza. 

China with a capital letter refers to the country itself but because adjectives of nationality are written without capital letters in Spanish, una china means a small pebble as well as a Chinese woman. 

Chino is the Chinese language, but un chino is a Chinese man although the term has acquired the meaning of a Chinese restaurant now that there are so many in Spain.  More recently, un chino is also understood to mean a shop with Chinese owners which sells an enormous variety of objects at very low prices.

Jugar a los chinos refers to a game often played by carousing adults to determine who pays for a meal or the next round of drinks.  It entails guessing the combined number of small objects concealed in a fellow-player’s closed fist, with the least consistent guesser footing the bill.  

Anyone investigating the equivalent of a Chinese puzzle will find this is un rompecabezas although this word covers all types of posers – even jigsaws - and not the fiendishly taxing kind that English-speakers associate with this kind of brainteaser.

La quinta china is the back of beyond. It sounds as though it could be the Chinese estate, a group of recruits called up to go to China or a scrambled version of el quinto pino – the fifth pine, yet another way to describe the back of beyond. 

Some people trace this to 18th century Madrid when the Paseo de Recoletos (still there, incidentally) was one of the city’s principal streets.  This led north into what is now the Paseo de la Castellana (temporarily Paseo del Generalísimo, but that’s another story) which was planted with five perfectly aligned, perfectly spaced pine trees.



Pines in Cap Negret, not Madrid



Madrid was smaller then and La Castellana was practically on the outskirts so the fifth pine – el quinto pino was, in those limited times, far enough away to be considered a very long way off.

Another faraway place, la Cochinchina, is your third option for the middle of nowhere but since  this was once the Vietnamese region whose capital is Saigon, at least you'll know how to get there.

Sweet Nothings

Una rosca can be two separate things. The first is the thread on a screw or screw top and the second is a round, biscuity sort of cake with a hole in the middle – not particularly exotic but more interesting than its distant English relation, a rusk. 

A young male who is not over-successful with the opposite sex might complain no me como ni una rosca. Literally this sad admission means I don’t get even one biscuity sort of cake etc. but implies (for want of a better way of putting it) it’s been a long time since I’ve been intimately involved with anyone.

It’s curious that such an austere turn of phrase should be chosen for such an unaustere activity, especially on pondering the euphemistic possibilities of  cakes, tarts and biscuits on view at a Spanish baker’s. 

Spaniards visiting Britain often express somewhat naive surprise at encountering so many churches in a famously secular country.  Britons react in much the same way to the many pastelerías and confiterías – cake shops that jostle with establishments providing the expected vino, tapas and paella.

Resort towns and villages boast multiple bakeries and cake shops but it is necessary to leave the coast behind to discover just how sweet Spain’s tooth is.  Order a café bombón (a shot of black coffee poured over a slug of super-sweet condensed milk) and it is invariably served with a packet of sugar in the saucer.

A sweet-toothed person is described as goloso, a pretty-sounding word that sounds less pretty if translated as greedy.  Una golosina is one translation for a sweet and un caramelo is another.  This sounds suspiciously like a caramel and it sometimes will be, but the word applies to most sweets not involving chocolate..

Much that is sweet and Spanish has a religious name or connection, possibly because so many convents maintained themselves (and still do) by producing and selling cakes and confectionary.

Huesos de santo, literally saints’ bones, are small rolls of marzipan with a sugar and yolk-based filling.  Sinfully delicious yemas de Santa Teresa are again made from egg yolks and sugar and acquired their name because, like Saint Teresa, they are associated with Ávila.

Tarta de Santiago is almond cake from Galicia which Santiago a.k.a. San Jaime Apostol – Saint James the Apostle supposedly visited, hence Santiago de Compostela in whose cathedral he is said to be buried.

Equally predictable, tarta de San Jorge is a Catalonian speciality honouring Saint George, the region’s patron saint (and England’s).

The adjective sweet is normally translated as dulce:  hogar, dulce hogar – home, sweet home but reappears in agua dulce – fresh water while pimentón dulce – paprika is described as sweet to distinguish it from hot pimentón picante.

Sweet nothings would be dulces ñoñerías although unfortunately ñoñería is irremediably linked to insipidness and fussiness, which says little for Spanish regard for romantic murmurings.

 A Spaniard would probably substitute amable, agradable for an English-speaker’s sweet person, reserving dulce for someone who is not only sweet but also gentle and charming and possessed of genuine, not synthetic, dulzura – sweetness.

Un mono is a monkey and una mona is a sugary, spicy bun eaten all year round, but topped with an unshelled hardboiled egg for Easter. 



una gatita salada



As an adjective mono or mona is appropriate for sweet, pretty children of either sex and sweet, pretty females of any age.  It also refer to the sweetness or pleasantness of any object, as in ¡qué gatita más mona! but you could just as easily exclaim ¡qué gatita más salada! and although this means what a salty little cat! everyone knows that you think she’s sweet.

All at sea

A life on the ocean wave is fine for those with sea-legs inside their sea-boots but landlubbers would agree that the Spanish show imagination by translating the sea as el mar and defining marear not only as to sail and to navigate but also to make ill, to annoy, to disturb or to bother. 

Perhaps the occasional sailor employs the verb marear to describe the risky business of going to sea but this is mostly used in circumstances which are generally anything but plain sailing.

Use of marear as well as estar mareado is a standard reaction to someone who is a nuisance: me estás mareando - you’re getting on my nerves! while ¡no me marees! is the stock injunction, don’t hassle me! Announcing estoy mareado generally conveys physical discomfort rather than state of mind and covers a wide range of queasiness: I feel sick, seasick, giddy, dizzy or simply I don’t feel too good. 

It can also be interpreted as I’ve had rather too much to drink and, as often happens with Spanish diminutives, a diminutive heralds excess and not moderation so César estaba un poco mareadito could be a charitable way of saying César was drunk.

Marear is a prime candidate for reflexiveness, but me mareo still means I am sick, seasick, giddy, dizzy or simply I don’t feel too good.

So what’s the difference between estoy mareado and me mareo?  There’s not a lot in it but there is definitely more urgency when the latter is an exclamation, and on hearing ¡me mareo! it is advisable to have brandy, smelling salts or, if the worst comes to the worst, a sick-bag at the ready.

In some circumstances mareo is a bother or a nuisance and a questioning ¿es mucho mareo? – is it much of a nuisance? is an apologetic way of indicating that you are aware of being a nuisance but are reluctant to modify or withdraw the request prompting the question. 



pleamar:  when the water laps round your neck

 

Living on the Mediterranean coast it is easy to forget that Spain has tidal coasts as well.  The noun marea means tide: marea alta - high tide and marea baja - low tide.    There are more scholarly terms, too: pleamar when the water laps round your neck, and bajamar when it’s licking round your ankles.

To go against the tide is ir a contracorriente because Spanish individualists fight the current instead but conformists who go with the flow let themselves be carried along with it: ir con la corriente. 

Fine phrases like a rising tide of indignation retain marine connections with una oleada de indignación, literally a wave of indignation.  A tidal wave was always un maremoto which a spot of straight translation reveals as a seaquake although this is increasingly replaced by the internationally recognisable tsunami. 

Marejada sounds faintly seasick and produces its own quota of wooziness, since it is a heavy sea and the diminutive marejadilla indicates the same state of affairs, only less so. 

Returning to marear and its associations with having drunk more than is wise it is fitting that a Spanish hangover is una resaca, whose principal translations are undercurrent and undertow, plus the additional landlocked definitions of reaction and backlash.  Certainly no-one would question their aptness on those awful mornings when you celebrated too well the night before, when you’re all at sea, shipwrecked too, and the only words you’re capable of uttering are ¡vaya mareo!

In full flower

In a country where morning glories inch their way along anything that will bear their weight, where oleanders thrive in  stony ground and jasmine froths round every doorway it isn’t surprising that flor – flower should crop up so often in Spanish.

The prime of life, for instance, is la flor de la vida – the flower of life. The cream of society is renamed la flor y nata de la sociedad – the flower and cream of society and in this instance flor means the best of or the most superior part of something.   And, as in English, flor is also the bloom found on plums or grapes.

A flor de means level with and when everything gets on top of them, the Spanish complain tengo los nervios a flor de piel – my nerves are on the surface, an uncomfortably graphic way to describe that unrestful state of mind and body.  A flor de tierra makes a subtle shift to mean just below the ground, however.

Florecer means to flower while floreciente – blooming can also refer, as it does in English, to flourishing looks or booming business which is logical enough, since anyone doing well financially generally manages to look gorgeous and glossy anyway.



Azahar looks as good as it smells



Florecer also translates to blossom, for which there is neither a specific verb or noun, so almond and apple blossom are flor de almendro and flor de manzano although orange blossom has its own delicious translation of azahar.  

As well as being the past participle of florecer, when used as an adjective florecido corresponds to gone to seed horticulturally rather than metaphorically. Pan florecido is bad news, too, and means mouldy bread.

Florido can mean both flowering, flowery or florid but the only way to convey florid’s red-faced English description is rojizo, which rather  fails to get across the necessary hint of bluster or sweatiness.

Florear means to adorn or decorate with flowers so floreado means flowery without necessarily implying affected or pretentious (although it often does).

Un florete is a fencer’s foil but una floritura is an unnecessary embellishment to a painting, piece of writing or music and una florera is a flower-girl of both the strewing and selling variety. 

Un florero is a vase, not forgetting a slightly scornful description for a trophy wife or a woman whose value is  strictly decorative.

A bunch of flowers is un ramo de flores and at this point the linguistically imaginative might be forgiven for assuming – wrongly - that una ramera is yet another flower girl. Instead, the term is one that has been in use since the XV century when a working girl advertised her trade by fixing a bouquet to her balcony or at her door, with the pretence that she sold flowers, not herself.

The strategy was not entirely successful, though, and to this day the word is still used as a label by the judgemental and/or elderly for the kind of woman they would unhesitatingly describe as “no better than she should be.”

Oleanders thrive in stony ground

Catcalls

It’s appropriate that a pet-shop should be a bird-shop – pajarería because the Spanish spent small fortunes on canaries or racing pigeons even when times were hard and non-flying domestic animals had to earn their food and houseroom. 

A good hunting (or poaching) dog was an even better investment than an operatic canary or jet-propelled pigeon but a cat was seldom anything other than a commonplace mouser. 

Velázquez put this in a nutshell over four centuries ago by devoting some of the right-hand corner of Las Meninas to a courtly, corpulent and long-suffering mastiff – mastín who patiently ignores the foot a child is planting on its back. 

Flora posing for Velázquez

Take a look at Las Hilanderas, however, and you’ll see a perfectly presentable tabby – gato atigrado with a nice white dicky - pechera relegated to the workroom floor.  In the spinners’ favour, though, is the way one woman looks as though she about to stroke the cat - or is she going to retrieve something from the floor? 

Un gato is a cat, una gata is a female cat, a tomcat is as un gato macho and a doctored, neutered male is un gato capado (or castrado if you like calling a spade a spade). 

People from Madrid are sometimes called gatos, a nickname allegedly earned in 1085 when Madrid was Magerit and under siege by the troops of Alfonso VI.  One soldier who was such a good climber that he earned himself the nickname of Gato scaled the fortress walls, then lowered ropes so his less catlike comrades could join him.  The fortress was taken, the Moorish flag removed and Magerit was on its way to becoming Madrid.

A non-animal, non-human gato is the jack used to prop up a car when changing a tyre and un gatillo is a trigger as well as the obvious kitten. 

Minino is the equivalent of puss and the traditional Micifuz corresponds to the equally traditional Tibby bestowed on my grandmother’s succession of cats.  Micifuz looks endearingly fuzzier and furrier although the Spanish pronunciation sounds rather like the spitting of an irate feline.

Gatear and andar a gatas (literally to walk like a cat) both mean to crawl or move on all fours and catlike is translated as felino, although a catty woman is described as maliciosa (unfair to cats) or, if she spices up the cattiness with gossip, chismosa. 

Some cat-connotations are lost in translation, so a catwalk is una pasarela or un andamio, depending on whether it is trodden by models or workmen and  a catcall is un abucheo.  To give a catcall requires the verb abuchear but a catnap dozes off into una cabezadita, literally a little nod, and catnip is nébeda or hierba gatera.  A cat burglar goes about his business as un balconero although a sneakthief is a rodent-like ratero. 

To let the cat out of the bag is delatar and to rain cats and dogs is llover a cántaros, literally jugsful.  Instead of smelling a rat, the Spanish say aquí hay gato encerrado – there’s a cat shut up here and dar gato por liebre – to give cat for hare is similar to selling, not buying, a pig in a poke.

Tiresome people who quibble or split hairs are said to look for three feet on the cat – buscar tres pies al gato.  You’d imagine any half-wit could easily find four but the erudite maintain that the pie in question is the metre in poetry and the saying refers to the futility of locating three syllables in a two-syllable word like gato.  And that’s a rather smart example of hair-splitting in itself.

Flora demonstrates how to catnap

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.