I’m reading a new book by the amazing, amazing, amazing Spanish writer Rafael Chirbes. In this novel, I discovered a new word: TUPERVARES.
Can you guess what it means?
This word is from the same group as GÜISQUI, PANCAQUES and YONQUI.
Obviously, you don’t have to be a Spanish-speaker to guess what the words mean.
Also, if you know more words like these, do share.
Tupperware :)? I can’t think of any others as interesting as the ones you listed. El beicon
LikeLike
Ta da! And we have our first winner! 🙂 🙂
LikeLike
I recognized them all (a hint, yonqui is not yankee) and have noticed them but my memory never works when I purposefully try to think of examples.
I have to say I prefer it when languages respell borrowings to conform to their orthography, or repronounce them so that when job turned into a verb in Swedish (att jobba) it was pronounced as if it had been a Swedish word all along (YOBB-ah) .
I’m trying to improve my Italian reading skills but online newspapers are a real drag because it’s apparently cool to import as many unnecessary English words as possible now, even if the English word originally is from latin). The result is about as attractive as turds in a punch bowl.
A bizarre one is ‘fiction’ not only does it replace the latin derived finzione (Italian needs to import latin vocabulary through English?) but it’s also used in a way it isn’t in English, mostly referring to tv shows instead of books and is a count noun so you can find ‘una fiction’. Books seem more immune (as does most spoken media (though there is a tendency to give tv shows english names) but the Italian press is really insufferable that way at present.
I’m done venting now…..
LikeLike
Yes, I’m afraid everybody is thinking of the wrong meaning for yonqui.
Has anybody guessed? A hint: when my students learn the word, they practically pee themselves with delight. And then for the next two weeks all I hear is this word in different contexts. 🙂
LikeLike
Ok, I’ll unravel the mistery: yonqui stands for junkie, drug-addict.
Very popular to refer to heroin-adicts in the 80s. Still very common in Spain nowadays too.
Your students would surely appreciate spending some time in Spain and listening how people pronounce film titles: Titanic, Spiderman, etc. Also words like Microsoft, Apple, Oracle… But I agree that yonqui has a special hilarity to it.
LikeLike
My professor of Medieval Spanish Literature once just slaughtered me with how he pronounced “puzzle.”
LikeLike
I remember seeing Taxi (about neofascist taxi drivers who murder social ‘undesirables’) by Saura in an advanced Spanish class I was auditing and in what was meant as a very dramatic scene the heroine asks her boyfriend what the codeword ‘carne’ means.
“Yonquis” (also spelled yonkis in Spain) was the answer at which point everyone burst out laughing, which kind of spoiled the dramatic tension.
here at 128.00
Oddly the word isn’t used in Polish which has ćpun (pronounced somewhere between тьпун and чпун) instead (etymology uncertain) the students knew it from English.
LikeLike
“A bizarre one is ‘fiction’ not only does it replace the latin derived finzione (Italian needs to import latin vocabulary through English?) but it’s also used in a way it isn’t in English, mostly referring to tv shows instead of books and is a count noun so you can find ‘una fiction’.”
– Fascinating. Something very similar is happening in Russian. It gets to the point where I have to decipher what Russian people say on TV by imagining how an unfamiliar word would sound in English. Sometimes, N and I sit there for ten minutes, trying to guess what a word means.
LikeLike
Hello Clarissa, I’m a recent reader of yours and can contribute some examples:
– Beisbol
– Magacín
– Bistec
– Zapear (hacer záping)
– Cóctel
– Esquí
LikeLike
Cool! I didn’t know zapear.
But I do know chequear and emailear. 🙂
And welcome to the blog, dear recent reader. 🙂
LikeLike
Did you forget lunchera?? 😉
LikeLike
No idea! But as you know my Spanish only comes from one source..
LikeLike
A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
Leave a comment