Caballero Juan - Dirty Spanish: everyday slang from Whats up? to F*%# off!

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Table of Contents

To my father, who taught me the lurid joys
of profanity; to my mother, who taught
me the inward satisfaction of pedagogy;
and to you, dear reader, for paying me to
combine the two.

Acknowledgments

Juan wishes he had the space and recollection to thank everyone who helped him with this book, but circumstances conspire against it. Chapters and entire draft copies were reviewed by Caballeros Mara and Carlos, Victor Goldgel Carballo, Gabrielle Wolodarski, Ignacio Gatto Bellora, and Jorge Daz-Velez. Roxana Fitchs website and the forum posters on wordreference.com also made this book possible, as did any number of anonymous wiki-ers, piroperos, smartasses, graffiti artists, poets and criminals. And thanks to Francine Masiello for recommending me for the job with her habitual overconfidence in my abilities.

USING THIS BOOK

This book was written with the assumption that you already know enough Spanish to get by. After all, this is a slang book, and slang tends to be the last thing you learn after getting down all the basic (and relatively useless) sayings, like I live in the red house and Yes, I like the library very much, thank you. This is a book designed to take your Spanish to the next level. So if youre looking for a grammar lesson, youre in the wrong spot. But if you want to tell your friend that he has a tiny dick or to get rid of the douchebag hitting on you in the bar, this is the book for you.

Every phrase in Dirty Spanish is up-to-date slang. Except in special cases, the English is given first, followed by the Spanish. Sometimes the Spanish is given with alternatives (gordo/a, tu/s) to account for gender or plural differences. This isnt a grammar book and youre not an idiot, so we expect that youll be able to figure it out without any more explanation.

PRONOUNCING SPANISH

Speaking Spanish like a pinche gringo will make you seem like, well, a pinche gringo, and will raise the price of everything you want to buy in proportion to how annoying your accent is. It can even mark you as an easy target for pickpockets or muggers. So get your pronunciation straight. You have three golden rules to remember:

1. Watch your damn vowels already! Each vowel is essentially the same in every context:

A is always like the a in father.
O is always like the o in bone.
I is always like the ie in wiener.
E is always like the e in wet.
U is always like the oo in poon, unless it comes after a
g or a q and has no umlaut dots over it.

One of the biggest slipups that English speakers make when speaking Spanish is following the unconscious English pronunciation rules that make vowels change contextually, smuggling in foreign As and turning every unstressed vowel into the uuuuh sound that Spanish speakers equate with the pronunciation of a village idiot (dont pruhtend you dont know whuht Im talking uhbout].

2. Pay attention to accents when learning new words, and review the accent rules online or in your old grammar book before traveling. If you put the accent on the wrong syllable, people think youre saying another word, which, 99 percent of the time, is a word that doesnt exist. Americans are often shocked by not being understood for having fudged such a minor detail. But its a major difference to Spanish speakers, so they, in turn, feel shocked when Americans walk around speaking gibberish and getting impatient with people.

3. Dont overpronounce. Pay attention to local pronunciation and try to keep up; it makes you sound natural and cool. Vowels and syllables sometimes drop out of the middle of long words (no te procupas). Ds between vowels at the end of words often drop out to make a vowel diphthong (its complicao). Consonants at the end of words in an unstressed syllable, particularly Ds and Ss, often get underpronounced or forgotten altogether [de vera, no te procupah).

In the Caribbean, this process is taken one step further, frequently coming right in the middle of a word (T huele comu pecao!). Also, syllable emphasis can change from city to city, overriding the normal accent-placement of a word. Subtle slipups like mixing up the pronunciation between S and Z or T and D, however the word might actually be spelled, can mark you as foreign. So listen closely to how people pronounce words you thought you already knew.

Unlike other volumes in the Dirty series, this book covers not one language but many. Thats because Spanish is not universal. Colombian slang is quite different from Spanish or Mexican slang. Most of the slang included here, though, was chosen because its easily understood in any Spanish- speaking country. But there are many terms that are region- or country-specific. For all of those, weve included abbreviations in parenthesis for the region or country where the phrase comes from:

COUNTRY	ABBREVIATION
Latin America	LatAm
South America	S.Am
Central America	CenAm
Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay)	S.Cone
Caribbean	Carib
Andes	Andes
Mxico	Mex
Guatemala	Gua
El Salvador	ElS
Honduras	Hon
Nicaragua	Nic
Costa Rica	CoR
Panama	Pan
Cuba	Cub
Dominican Republic	DoR
Puerto Rico	PuR
Venezuela	Ven
Colombia	Col
Ecuador	Ecu
Peru	Per
Bolivia	Bol
Chile	Chi
Paraguay	Par
Uruguay	Uru
Argentina	Arg
Spain	Spn

Whenever a regional term is given in addition to a universal one, you can assume itll sound more natural to someone from that region to hear that term. However, many regional words are rapidly becoming international as Latin American media culture continues to globalize, and as teenagers all over the world listen to MP3s and download TV shows from around the Spanish-speaking globe.

If personal curiosity or professional demands require you to know exactly where a given term is used, or if you want to dive deeper into the seedy world of Spanish slang, the easiest place to start is online:

www.rae.esThe Real Academia Espaolas online dictionary may not always be cutting-edge for Latin American slang, but at least its reliable and accurate.

www.jergasdehablahispana.orgRoxana Fitchs invaluable, free, and searchable dictionary houses a massive collection of slang, sorted by region.

forum.wordreference.comThe Word Reference forums are a thriving international community of professional translators and amateur linguists where you can get answers from real people in the field.

The best language teacher, however, will always be immersion. So get to traveling, do some downloading, start YouTubeing, or, at the very least, go to the Hispanic part of town and strike up some conversationsjust dont start with the Angry Spanish chapter!

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