En la sombra de La Giralda: blog con leche

My pal John, the only person I know with the work Jerk tatooed on his arm, has been on a teaching gig in Spain. His return to the states marks "the first time in his adult life that he's been proud of his country"[oh, wait, that's someone else's line], his chance to be forced to travel by automobile for simple errands that can easily be done by foot or mass transit in most other parts of the world, or his chance to make you realize that he's typically a lot more brutually honest about his feelings than moi.

In the Jerk's honor, we are turning the blagh over to him for a day. Read on ants!
__

As i sit here in Seville, Spain, feeling as if i've been beaten in the head with a brick, i can't help but complete my long overdue promise to inform the people who read this blog about something more than jerky. maybe it's the "heroic" (or maybe it was anti-heroic?) amount of booze i drank last night or the TONS OF FUN that i've been having, but something has flipped a switch and i now feel as if other people's wants do matter. strange, huh? i think i've used up a lifetime of leisure time and now all that's left is work.

i have been studying spanish for 19 of the 24 years of my life. i learned in an full-immersion environment and am completely convinced that it is the absolute best and easiest way to learn a language. that is why i am now in spain. i decided that it was time for me to immerse myself again so that i could recover the fluency that i had lost. the coolest part about being here and being an "adult" is that i now get to go to bars and hang out on the street with delinquents and hear people fight and swear and insult each other and generally have a good time. in spanish. learning how to swear is one of the most important parts of learning a new language. it doesn't matter if your grammar is good or not if you can insult someone's mother in their native tongue. i usually get bored with conversations that don't involve elaborate wordplay and mind numbingly stupid puns, so i often occupy myself with accumulating funny sounding turns of phrase. one of my personal favorites is the use of the word "leche" in spanish slang. if you've at all studied spanish in high school, you probably know that "leche" means milk. the main difference between europeans and americans is that europeans have been living in the same places for, like, more than 1000 years. this leaves a lot of time for linguistic drift (the forming of new languages/dialects) and a lot of time for expressions to evolve. of course, spanish folks have always had milk, so i imagine that it's use in slang is much older than just the last 40 years (cool, dude). here's a list of some phrases using "leche" and their equivalent english meanings:

"corred cagando leches" = "hurry the hell up"
"cago en la leche!" = "i fucked up"
"...a todo leche" = "all the way up" (kind of depends on what you're talking about. like, "the radio was turned all the way up")
"es la leche" = "it's the shit"

these are hilarious of you literally translate them:

"run shitting milks"
"i shit the milk"
"at full milk"
"it's the milk"

i have no idea how this usage came about, but it is infinitely entertaining. i can't stop myself from using it! now, my equivalent translations i used above may be a little strong considering the spanish versions are not necessarily considered swears, but they can carry a varying amount of force depending on how you use them. translating swear words is one of the most interesting things i've encountered in all of my language studies. i've spent the entire nine months i've been here trying to figure out a way to literally translate my favorite insult ("go fuck yourself") into spanish. it's not that hard to literally translate it, but yelling "vete a joder a si mismo" doesn't have a lot of art to it. it's much more effective to use the already common "vete al carajo!" or "vete a la mierda" which literally means "go to the boner" or "go to the shit" respectively. they each have the same force, but don't mean the same thing literally. it's all about matching the force of the expression instead of the meaning. another example would be using the word "fucking" as an adjective. in spanish, it's uncommon to say "el jodido presidente" (which literally means "the fucked president), but it's really common to say "el puto presidente" (literally meaning "the whore president"). "puta/o" means whore, but it is often used in the same way as we would use "fucking." now, these expressions are much closer in literal meaning to ours, but the "leche" ones can carry the same force as any of these depending on how you use them.

i know i was supposed to be here reading about Don Juan Manuel and the Archipreste de Hita and all that jazz, but i decided that was not something that interested me. it's never been that fun to study the dead parts of a language or a culture. i'm more interested in studying the living parts. it's the milk.

read more of the jerk's work at:
En la sombra de La Giralda