Mary McVey Gill - The Red-Hot Book of Spanish Slang: 5,000 Expressions to Spice Up Your Spanish

The RED-HOT Book of Spanish Slangand Idioms

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Youre walking down the street and you hear Quhbole! or Qu padre! or Qu onda? but you never learned these expressions and cant find them in a dictionary. Later on that day, you want to tell some Spanish-speaking friends that you think the gift they gave you was cool; you know it cant possibly be fresco, which applies to temperature, but what is the word to use? Youll find the answer in The Red-Hot Book of Spanish Slang and Idioms: 5,000 Expressions to Spice Up Your Spanish. It has both a Spanish-English and an English-Spanish component.

Whether you are listening to people talk, watching a Spanish-language movie, listening to the radio, or reading an interview of Antonio Banderas or Salma Hayek, the book you are holding in your hand will be a great companion. In addition to slang and idioms that are universal, it includes common regional slang. Country codes, or references, are given so that you know just where each expression is used.

Youre writing an e-mail to a friend and you want to know how to say Thats a drag! or What a downer! in Spanish. Or youre calling a Spanish-speaking friend to accept an invitation to a party or invite that person to your house, but beforehand you want to know how to say Super! or Awesome! The English-Spanish section of The Red-Hot Book of Spanish Slang and Idioms is just the ticket to give your Spanish the chispa or spark that it needs.

Here is a typical entry in the Spanish-English section:

Definite articles indicate gender of nouns. Feminine forms of nouns are given in parentheses:

The feminine ending is typically added after dropping -o or -e; for example, the feminine form of el cuate is la cuata. If no feminine ending is given, the noun is invariable (it is the same in the feminine as in the masculine): el/la hincha (fan, sports enthusiast). When an expression requires a specific verb form in the second person (you in English), the t form is normally used rather than usted, since slang is primarily informal. Notes referring to register (level of formality) or to specific country variations are given in parentheses.

Here is a typical entry in the English-Spanish section:

While no attempt was made to sanitize the language by eliminating off-color expressions, words considered vulgar are marked with the word vulgar in parentheses and some very strong terms have been avoided.

Native readers from many different Spanish-speaking countries helped to create the final manuscript. Each word or expression is accompanied by a list of abbreviations representing the countries and regions in which the word or expression is used. Where there is regional variation in the use of a particular expression, a note is made, preceded by the abbreviation RVAR.