"Color-ish"

Here are the most common adjectives derived from color names in Spanish:

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Compradre

Compadre is a word that most people think means buddy, friend. This word really indicates the relationship between a father and the godfather of his child. The relationshiop between the mother and the godmother of her child is comadre.

In colloquial speech, and in most Hispanic countries, this word is also used to refer to a very close friend. There are many variations like compa, cumpa, compay, compadrito, comadrita.

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El sol sale

Salir...salir..... I don't know why books written by American Ph.D.'s translate this verb as to leave. When we hear this verb, we don't really think about leaving but about exiting, we think about going/coming outside, we think about the exterior.

We say things like, el sol sale a las seis de la mañana. If you use the usual American Ph.D.'s translation, this would mean: the sun leaves at six in the morning. Does it make sense? Of course it doesn't. It would make sense if it was six in the afternoon, but not in the morning.

Salir in this case means to come out: the sun comes out at six in the morning. Salir also means to go out, to exit, to get out, to come out (the outcome of something), to appear on a publication/media, to cost, and perhaps many other meanings..

So we have several words and expressions that we use during sunrise and during sunset:

El sol está a punto de salir, the sun is about to come out. This snowcapped volcano is called, among other names, "La Mujer Dormida", The Sleeping Lady. It's located right outside Mexico City. This is a typical Mexico City sunrise, although not as close as this, if you live towards the east side of the city.

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La bruja de mi mujer

There are many grammar structures that are not taught in textbooks. Students listen to them in soap operas or movies, and they don't understand them.

This is one of them.

Mi vecina tonta or mi vecina es tonta means my dumb neighbor or my neighbor is dumb. Vecina is the noun and tonta is the adjective. This structure reverses the roles of these words in order to emphasize the fact that the neighbor is dumb in a somewhat sarcastic/playful way. The result is la tonta de mi vecina. Tonta here is the noun, and vecina moves to a prepositional phrase. The final result might be a sentence like La tonta de mi vecina dejó su carro en frente de mi cochera. My dumb neighbor left her car in front of my garage.

El flaco de mi hermano. Mi hermano es flaco. My skinny brother.
El enojón de tu tío. Tu tío es enojón. Your cranky uncle.
El goloso de Juanito. Juanito es un goloso. Juanito has a sweet tooth.
El egoísta de mi jefe. Mi jefe es egoísta. My selfish boss. My boss is selfish.
El chismoso de Marcelo ya metió la pata. Marcelo the gossip already stuck his foot in his mouth.
Necesito que la cerebrito de mi hermana me ayude con la tarea. I need my smart sister to help me with my homework.

And the tipical soap opera complaint: La bruja de mi mujer. Mi mujer es una bruja. My wife is a witch.

In some cases they combine these two words, bruja and mujer, and say mi brujer, very witty.

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X

The letter X is called equis (pronounced /ekis/.) It has several uses in Spanish, so I will try to explain some of them.

It's used, like in mathematics, to replace a mystery number, and it's used to replace a mystery something. For example, El Señor X is Mr. Mystery. Mr. X. Equis cosa means any thing or some thing. X cantidad is an x amount.

5 X 4 = 20 is read cinco por cuatro es igual a veinte. X stands for the preposition por that we use in mathematics. So you can say vote x mí, vote for me. It's frequently used in text messaging instead of the preposition por.

We use X just like English as a cross mark to grade a wrong answer. In Mexico we call it tache, as opposed to paloma, dove, check mark, which means a good mark or a good answer.

We use it as a brand. This reads Dos Equis, two x

We also have Tres Equis

MX is the internet domain name of Mexico, and it's used in many Mexican related things:

X Rays are Rayos Equis

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Cuenta

There are many expressions that include the noun cuenta, which have many different meanings. This is a reason why this noun and it's expressions are very confusing.

Cuenta is a noun, something different is the verb contar. Eso es otro cuento (That's another story). Its conjugation is yo cuento, tú cuentas, él cuenta, nosotros contamos, ellos cuentan, ustedes cuentan. Some conjugations resemble the noun cuenta. ¿Qué me cuentas? means What´s new? Cuento ( a masculine noun) is a different noun which has its own set of expressions. It means story, tale, cuento de hadas is a fairy tale.

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In Spanish, things also want, or don't...

In Spanish we use the verb querer, to want, for acts that we don't have control over.

Examples, if the sky is grey and it's windy, we say quiere llover, lit: it wants to rain (remember there is no "it" in Spanish as the subject of a sentence), meaning it seems that it's going to rain, or it looks like it's going to rain.

If you are trying to open a door, but the key doesn't turn, we say la llave no quiere dar vuelta, the key doesn't want to turn. If you are trying to remove a stain from shirt, for example, but after trying and trying the stain won't go away, you say la mancha no quiere salir, or la mancha no se quiere quitar, lit: the stain doesn't want to leave.

If you are cooking, let's say, a turkey, and it's been in the oven for hours, and it still doesn't get well done, you might say el pavo no se quiere cocinar, lit: the turkey doesn't want to get cooked. If you turn on the faucet, but the water won't come out, a native Spanish speaker would probably say no quiere salir el agua, the water doesn't want to come out. If you buy new shoes but they are too small and you are trying to put them on, a native Spanish speaker might say los zapatos no me quieren entrar, the shoes don't want to enter on my foot, the shoes won't fit.

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Movement

We use the preposition hacia, towards, to indicate movement towards a point.

Do not confuse hacia (without accent) and hacía (with a written accent), which is an imperfect tense conjugation of hacer, to do, to make, ago.

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Nationality nicknames

These are some of the Spanish nicknames that refer to some nationalities, used specially in the sports environment.

Nationalities in Spanish do not need to be capitalized. Maybe there are more nicknames, but these are the ones most commonly used.

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Tutear

When you start a relationship in Spanish, sometimes you are forced to choose between using tú or usted. That is a critical moment in a relationship. If you pick usted, it could become somewhat awkward to switch to tú later on. For example, my mother calls her neighbor in Mexico City Señora Kuri, or Doña Olga, but never plain Olga. Their houses are right next to each other, they are about the same age, they spend some time at each other´s house, and yet, 25 years later, they still use usted. It would be very awkward for them to just say, "we have been friends for 25 years, why don't we start talking to each other using tú?"

We have a verb for switching a relationship from usted to tú: tutear. You would use it this way: ¿Por qué no nos tuteamos? Why don't we use tú? (this sentence uses reciprocal "se")..

Other languages also have an equivalent verb. In German, they use Du (tú) and Sie (usted). The verb to switch is duzen. In Romanian they use tu but they have one more level of politeness than German or Spanish: dumneata (super-tú) and dumneavoastră (usted). So for them it must be even harder to switch from any of those higher levels to tu. Their verb to switch is a se tutui. In fact, whenever I talk to Romanians in Spanish, they would use usted with me. They would never jump directly to tú. That´s a big cultural difference. In Brazilian Portuguese, most people use você (usted), which in many parts of Brazil it is equivalent to tú, so they don't care much about switching, but they have tu and the verb is also tutear, just like Spanish. In French the verb is tutoyer. Old English also had its equivalent to our familiar and informal tú: thou. The verb to switch from ye (usted) to thou was also to thou.

Don Juan Carlos, the King of Spain, used tú to ask president Hugo Chavez to shut up.

Remember that three Spanish speaking countries don't naturally use tú: Costa Rica, Colombia, and Argentina. I remember watching a Univision interview with president Uribe of Colombia; during the interview he switched back and forth from usted to tú, and he made several mistakes and hesitated using verbs conjugated in the tú form, so then he switched back to usted, and so on. It was evident that tú doesn´t come out naturally for him, but he was trying hard. Jorge Ramos, the TV anchor interviewing him, was using usted only to address the president during the interview.

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Leonora Carrington

One of the most famous Mexican surrealist painters who met Picasso, Dalí, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, fled from the Nazis, escaped from a psychiatric hospital, and most importantly, is still alive and still paints well in her 90's, is the British born Leonora Carrington. She is literarily fantastic. Judge by yourselves. Here are some of her paintings I found on the internet:

They hardly know her in England (of course, she has lived in Mexico for more than 60 years) The Tate museum has only two of her paintings, and they are not even paintings, they are ink sketches. Since she will be with us for quite some time, hopefully, it's still not too late for her to be recognized in her native country, just don't take her away from us! One of my students, Avi, is cousin of the current British Foreign Minister, so I'll let him know. Each of her paintings can reach more than 1 million dollars. Just see this example sold at Christie's:

Leonora Carrington (English/Mexican b. 1917)...
The Giantess also known as The Guardian of the Egg
PRICE REALIZED
$1,482,500

You can see an online gallery of Leonora Carrington here

This is a news report written by her great nephew for Britain's The Guardian newspaper

Leonora Carrington on Wikipedia

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Learn how to recognize hidden HAYs

Hay is a special conjugated form of the verb haber, which is used to indicate existence. It´s English equivalents are: there is, there are, is there...?, are there...? This verb is always in its singular form. Some people, mistakenly, use it in the plural form, like habíamos, habían, habemos, etc. For the Royal Academy, this usage doesn't officialy exist. Here are many examples in the affirmative form:

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The Spanish H versus F in most other Romance Languages

There are dozens of examples of words in Spanish that are spelled with a (silent) H, for which you can find at least one cognate in another language that is spelled with F. Most languages followed the original Latin spelling. I don't like this, ha ha, why do we have to be different to the rest of the languages? Who in the old Spain came up with this great idea? Nobody knows for sure. Obviously, we are the ones who are "wrong". As you can see, sometimes this is true even when comparing English words. Here is my research.

Something similar happened with the Spanish J. We pronounce it differently than most other languages.

My guess is that this happened because in Spain they already had the characteristic TH sound for C and Z that sometimes can be confused with the F sound. If on top of that you added the F sounds of the H, plus the PH of Greek and Latin, the language would end up sounding like FFFTHTHFFFTHTH, like a highly lisping language, which in Latin America wouldn't be true.

Versus

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Cabo San Lucas has no flu

The fishermen in Cabo San Lucas, Baja California Sur, Mexico, say there is no flu

but of course there is, otherwise, why would the fish be affraid of catching it?

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Claxon

This is a very interesting word that comes from the U.S. trademark Klaxon. What's interesting about it, is the fact that it's used more in other countries (and in other languages) than in the U.S.. Even Spanish speaking people in New York prefer the alternate word bocina. It just means a car's horn. In some languages, like in Romanian for example, it's also a verb, a claxona. In Spanish, tocar el claxon means to honk. You know, tocar is a Spanish verb that means to touch, to play musical instruments or music, but it's also used to produce a sound, like when knocking on the door, ringing a bell, or ringing a door's buzzer. While in English this word is reserved for a more technical environment, in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian, Czech, and some other languages, this is a word you will always use when driving.

¿Quién toca el claxon más que nadie en Nueva York?

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Vaya

It's very uncommon that a dictionary features a conjugated verb as an entry. If you want to find a verb, you always have to look up the infinitive form of that verb. For example, the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española doesn't even allow you to look up "hay", which is a conjugated form of haber that indicates existence (there is, there are). Surprisingly, there is an exception: the dictionary has a special entry for the third person singular of the present subjunctive form of the verb "ir" (to go), which is vaya. This verb form is used as an expression to indicate surprise, superlative, irony, etc.

vaya. (3.ª pers. de sing. del pres. de subj. de ir). 1. interj. U. para comentar algo que satisface o que, por el contrario, decepciona o disgusta. Pablo ha aprobado todas las asignaturas, ¡vaya! No podemos ir al teatro: se ha suspendido la sesión, ¡vaya! 2. interj. U., antepuesta a un sustantivo, en construcciones exclamativas, para conferir sentido superlativo a las cualidades buenas o malas, según sean la entonación y contexto, que se reconocen en la persona o cosa designadas por dicho sustantivo. ¡Vaya mujer! ¡Vaya reloj que te has comprado! 3. interj. U., seguida de la preposición con y de un sintagma nominal, para marcar la actitud, favorable o desfavorable del hablante, matizada muchas veces de ironía, ante la persona o cosa designada por dicho sintagma. ¡Vaya con el niño! ¡Vaya con la musiquita!

¡Vaya vaya!, is an expression used when you want to sound a little surprised and sarcastic at the same time; like when you catch someone red handed.

Ricardo Montalbán (November 25, 1920-January 14, 2009)

Many remember this great Mexican actor because of his role as Fantasy Island's Mr. Roark, because of Khan in Star Treck, and because of this 1970's TV commercial and his phrase "soft Corinthian leather."

Ricardo Montalbán's Wikipedia entry.

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