The citizens of the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain were recently polled on the question of whether life had got better for them since their country entered the EU. The surprise is not that the majority of Spanish felt it had but that positive views were in the minority in each of the other 4 countries. Needless to say, the Brits complained most. The Spanish attitude was put down to the fact that ‘Spain and its citizens have benefited from the lion's share of EU funds, regarded as a key factor in its economic success story’.

Another non-surprise – A storage company in the UK threw out a work of art by a Turner Prize winner, mistaking it for rubbish. It is now being sued for the ‘value’ of Hole And Vessel II – said to be worth £350,000 to some cretin with more money than aesthetic sense.

As I crawl slowly towards 50,000 hits, I’ve decided to compile posts of the last 3 years under the various headings that are now listed down the right hand side of this blog. I’m starting with Spanglish and, if anyone has a preference for the next slug, please post it in a comment . . .

SPANGLISH

2003-4

The Spanish have a growing love affair with the English gerund. They use it even when the word means something else in English. Or doesn’t even exist. So, ‘footing’ is jogging. And ‘mobbing’ is harassment at work. And ‘un parking’ is a car park. This week I have come across a new one – a ‘lifting’ is a facelift! In a similar vein, they appear to have adopted the word ‘light’ [as in ‘Coca Cola light’] but to have given it a negative connotation. Last night I listened to a discussion about ‘padres light’. This turned out to mean bad parents, i. e. those who don’t fulfil their obligations to their kids. I like to think of myself as a ‘father heavy’.

A couple more gerunds:-
- ‘Un peeling’ is a scraping of facial skin, understandably.
- Stretching’ is aerobics

A correction – a face-lift is actually a ‘liftin’, not a ‘lifting’. Pro- nounced ‘leefteen’. My apologies.

A couple more gerunds in today’s papers:-

Rafting – white water rafting, fairly enough.
Puenting – jumping off bridges [puentes], usually with a bit of rubber attached to your ankles. This nicely combines English and Spanish to make a word which exists in neither language. Spanglish, I guess.

A possible sighting of another gerund…. stepping. This is the aerobics exercise, of course. But I have a suspicion it is more of a French than a Spanish usage. Vamos a ver.

Gerund Watch – two more spotted this week:-

Un piercing. No explanation needed, though it means the adornment itself and not the operation to append it.

Un happening. Ditto, I guess

Gerund watch: Two more sightings this week, one real and one illusory. The latter was ranking but this turns out to be not the gerund but the English noun used to mean the same thing in Spanish. The genuine article was un smoking . This is a type of jacket and the word has been in use for so long that it is sometimes seen in its Hispanicised form, un esmoquin.

Gerund Watch 1: I was very taken with this one in yesterday’s paper :- decisión-making. This one is a beauty as, firstly, it contains a helpful accent on the last syllable and, secondly, it actually appears to mean in Spanish what it means in English. This is unique, in my experience.

Gerund Watch 2: This is not really a gerund; it just looks like one. The English word pudding has been transmuted into puding [sometimes pudín] to mean a specific dessert – rice pudding usually.

Reading about the respective sizes of English and Spanish vocabularies today, I came across the statement that English is growing because of the number of technical words being added to it, whereas Spanish is growing because of the number of English words it is absorbing. Who would have thought it?

After several years of hard labour, the Royal Academy for the Spanish Language has issued a dictionary which aims to clear up certain linguistic uncertainties within the Hispanic world. Here are a few which caught my Anglo-Saxon eye in yesterday’s report:-

Words no longer permissible in Spanish, together with the approved word:-

Rafting – Balsismo

Airbag – Bolsa de aire

Consulting – Consultaría

Mobbing [sexual harrassment] – Acoso laboral or Acoso moral

Supermodelo – Top-model

Windsurfing - Tablavela

Words that are acceptable provided that….

Gay – To be spelled and pronounced gaí

Rock and Roll – To be rocanrol

Ranking – To be ranquín

By-pass – To be baipas

Zoom – To be zum

Spanish neologisms that need to be fully Hispanicised:-

Puenting – To be puentismo

I have to admit that every time I see a report like this, a vision of Canute springs to mind.

Just a couple of days after the launch of the dictionary designed to root out Anglicisms in Spanish, a new one has taken centre stage – El bullying. See what I mean about Canute?

A plea for help. An advert in El Mundo today for a Smartcar today tells me that it is a ‘forfour’ and that it has ‘fliping’ with this feature. I guess that ‘forfour’ means ‘4x4’ and is favoured because it’s both English [almost] and snappier than ‘todotereno’. But I’ve no idea what ‘fliping’ might be. Any experts out there?

There have been articles in the papers this week about emails from phoney bank sites. This is called phishing elsewhere but has been transmuted into phising here.

In view of the pleasure they give me, I have expanded the Gerund Watch to include all Spanglish words I come across. This week’s crop:-

Un flash – a cameraman, paparazzi

Un nick – a nickname

Hackear – to hack [into a computer, not into undergrowth]

Un hacker – have a guess

Seen this weekend:-

Top: Leading, as in Un top artista

Un top: A supermodel

Un disco light: A disco for younger people

Charme: Charm. Possibly a spelling mistake.

Fashión: Fashionable, as in Este sitio es muy fashión - This is an in place.

I have to be careful of exercise-creep here. The temptation is to include everything that is even a little strange, such as líder, which, of course, is leader. Or yate - yacht. But I will restrict myself to words which don’t have anything like the same meaning in English. Or even exist. So:-

Un travelling: This is a camera on tracks. Or a dolly, to give it its proper name

Un mister: This is what soccer coaches are usually called

Un sir: And this is what they are accorded when they are as famous as Alex Ferguson of Manchester United.

Un camping – a campsite

Un spinning – some sort of exercise in the gym involving a cycling machine. Or perhaps several in a circle.

Un tuning: Customisation of your car, by the addition of ridiculous spoilers usually.

Un handicap: A disadvantage

Un peeling: A face peel

Overbooking: Overbooking - replacing [for reasons unclear] the perfectly good Spanish word sobreventa.

And here’s a very recent sighting which might made its way into Spanish or might just be knocking on the door - colegio after-hours. This, of course, is a school which gives extra lessons outside the normal hours.

Gánster – Gangster, of course

Puzzle – pronounced ‘pooth-lay’. Jigsaw

Un borderline – A person of subnormal intelligence

Prime time – Prime time

Top-less – Topless

Pimpón - Table tennis

Eslogan – Slogan. Curiously, the plural of this is eslogans, as it would be in English. Not esloganes, as it would be in Spanish

El backstage – Backstage

El casting - Casting

En fashion – In fashion

Un reality show – Guess

Un docu show – A drama serial or soap opera [I think]

All of the following words were in one Sunday paper last weekend, admittedly in the Arts section for the most part. I suspect that it is here that the most avant-garde writers polish their apples:-

Los chillouts – Relaxation areas in clubs.

Un stand – Stand or stall. Again, this has the English plural ‘stands’, not the Spanish ‘standes’.

El gran feeling – Your guess is as good as mine

Un multiplex – As in English

El Establishment – Ditto.

Una road movie – Ditto

Un blog – Ditto

El glamour – Ditto

Password – Ditto, in place of contraseña. For no good reason, as far as I can see.

Sometimes I wonder why I am bothering to learn Spanish. Such is the pace of adoption, if I hang around for long enough, I shouldn’t need to.

Un flirt – Guess

Flirtear – To flirt. Of course.

Un reality – Short for un reality show

And now … this week’s crop of Anglicisms from my Sunday paper……

Un mitin – Political rally/meeting

Un best-seller – Harry Potter, for example

Un thriller de serie – A crime series

Un drag – A drag queen. Note the masculine gender.

Una conejita de Play Boy – A Playboy bunny. Or worse.

Un outsider – A misfit, I think.

Una top-model – A supermodel

Una supermodelo – Ditto

El top-ten – The top ten.

Un magazines – An armoury. As in ‘This constituted a powerful argument in his armoury.’

Un killer format – A highly successful TV show such as Who Wants to be a Millionaire? The helpful equivalent – formato asesino – was given in brackets so this must be a new one.

I guess there will be no surprise that none of these appears in my Spanish dictionary.

Alto standing – The very best quality. This is a stock feature of the vice ads at the back of the papers. I notice.

Chequeo – A test, as in ‘You can’t have your money from this ATM as we are running a test’.

Jersey – Pullover. Very long-established, this one.

I’m off to the UK again tomorrow for a week or so and will leave you with the following lean pickings on the Spanglish front:

Escáner – Scanner

Búnker – Bunker. Probably German in origin

And on a lighter note…..

Romperécords – Record breaker

Clúster – Group, especially of companies

Clan – Group, of criminals

Nightology – Your guess is as good as mine; it appears in an ad

Filibusterismo – Filibustering.

I cited filibusterismo just before I went off to France. I’ve since discovered that this is derived from the English ‘freebooter’ and so originally meant ‘pirate’ in Spanish. By pure coincidence, I saw in France a very similar word – filibustier – in an article on Francis Drake, clearly also meaning ‘pirate’. So…. here we have a word [freebooter] which was corrupted into both Spanish and French as filibuster/filibustier and which then returned to English in its revised form meaning what it does today. As least that’s my theory and I’m sticking to it. I trust you are all as fascinated as I am by these linguistic gymnastics.

Wellness: My medical insurance company has launched a new offering – USP Wellness. To no great surprise, this centres on cosmetic surgery. Wellness is a translation of the Spanish word bienestar and so it seems that the company felt that ‘wellbeing’, ‘welfare’ and ‘comfort’ were simply not trendy enough. Call for a new word. Or perhaps the resurrection of an obsolete one

Whenever they want to invent mock Spanish, Anglo-Saxons add the letter ‘O’ to English words. Occasionally it works. Dogo, would you believe, is a bull mastiff. In similar [but more topical] vein, un chute is a shot at goal in football. The verb is chutar. Or shoot, to you and me.

Un holding – A holding company

Fresh – New. As in ‘Skoda’s fresh range of cars’

Un folklórico – A folk singer

Los Airbags – Breasts

Los boxes – The pits, as in Formula 1 motor racing

Gay – Homosexual. Pretty obvious but the interesting thing is the pluralisation. So ‘homosexual marriages’ becomes ‘matrimonios gays’

Gogó – Dancer

Ye-yé – Groovy, trendy [Think of the 60s]

Flash – In-a-glance, as in Pontevedra Flash = Pontevedra at-a-glance

Bum – Boom, as in Bum inmobiliario = Construction boom

Un vip [pronounced ‘bip’] – A celebrity. Or VIP.

Un freakie – an oddball, I guess

Unas superwomans - superwomen

El top-less – the practice of bathing bare-breasted. By women, of course

Un body – A body stocking. Fair enough; English has stolen the French word basque for this, I believe.

El playback – Lip synching.

Well, it’s Sunday and no one is reading this. So here’s some more Spanglish words to fill the space…

Un spot – Advertisement

Un déficit – Deficit. The plural of this is Déficits and not, as it should be, Déficites.

Un yonqui – Drug addict or Junkie. Not an American/Yankee

Un pedigrí – Pedigree

Los beats – Beatniks

Un rifirrafe – Row or shindig. Can’t help feeling there is some connection between this and riff-raff. Arabic origins?

2005

Recent Spanglish sightings:-

Un slip - Men’s underpants

Un mailing – Email

Soso – Insipid

And I’m indebted to a leaflet that was stuck on my windscreen for these activities, which presumably take place under a fire sprinkler:-

Aquajogging

Aquaerobic

Aquagym

Aquastep

The Spanglish I love best is not the single English words that don’t actually exist [un footing, un lifting, un parking, etc.] but the combination of Spanish and English words. Here’s a couple recently seen:-

En off – Off stage

La punta del iceberg – The tip of the iceberg

And talking of words, here’s the latest bit of Spanglish I’ve seen…. Frenesí – Frenzy. There’s some irony here, as the English word has come from Latin, via French. Which leaves me wondering why frenesía doesn’t exist in Spanish.

The latest wonderful bit of Spanglish I’ve stumbled on – Liftar – to loft or lob a ball.

And a new piece of Spanglish:–

Los carvings - Curved skis, I believe.

2006

Finally, some more wonderful Spanglish – Young Spanish women are said to fall into one of two basic groups: On the one hand we have La techno-woman, who is at ease with modern technology. And on the other, we have La mujer off-line. Who isn’t. So she won’t be reading this.

Fliparse – 1. To get stoned, 2. To go or be driven round the bend

And finally, the name of a chap who fitted some windows for my daughter:-
Dionisius Sandia Nogales – Dionysius Watermelon Walnut-tree

Finally, a new bit of Spanglish. Not in my dictionary.

Escrachar – To scratch, I guess.

Penultimately, another bit of Spanglish:-

Mushing – Races in which sleds are pulled by dogs. Honest.

Here’s another stab at a bit of Spanglish – I’m told the word for someone high on drugs is espidioso. As this is pronounced ‘espeedeeoso’, I assume the root is ‘speed’. But since I can’t find any trace of the word on the web, perhaps someone is having me on. Anyone heard it?

Finally, un friki appears to be the Spanglish for what would be called a nerd or a techie in the UK. Not a bad word for Eurovision song contestants either.

On a lighter note - It’s been a while since I reported any Spanglish. So here’s something that foxed me for a few seconds:- Estripitís – Striptease

The Spanish equivalent of ‘off Broadway’ is the Spanglish ‘off Gran Via’. For the life of me, I can’t recall what the British equivalent is but doubtless someone will put me out of my misery.

The English contraction of ‘web log’ to ‘blog’ has now been extended in Spanglish to ‘blogillo’. I also learned that the writer is apparently unaware of my blog. Which was a bit miffing. Playing an ironic victim card, I put it down to Galician nationalism.

I came across a new bit of Spanglish today – El slamming. This is the practice of making it incredibly easy for you to sign up to a phone contract and then virtually impossible for you to extricate yourself when you are fed up with the abominable service and the fraudulent billing practices.