Palabritas del día – mantequilla

I forgot to mention a few other great resources I use en mi búsqueda de aprender español…

Primero, otro diccionario. This one is the Spanish-English Bilingual Visual Dictionary from Dorling Kindersley. It is very thorough, fairly small and really great to help both English- and Spanish-speakers have common ground so they can know what the heck they’re talking about.

For verbs, I also have the seemingly-ubiquitous 501 Spanish Verbs by Kendris (though I have the fourth edition). It is great but to be honest I use the web so much more. I think Verbix is the bee’s knees. Since they don’t have a Mac version I just use the online conjugator, it’s fast and I love the format, with all irregularities highlighted in red.

Y ahora, por fin, algunas palabras con frases hechas…

la mantequilla — butter
¡Para de llorar! La gente creerá que seas de mantequilla. — Stop crying! People will think you’re a crybaby. Literally, “you are of butter”. Soft, yellow and greasy? Yuck; I think maybe I’m going to cry now, though at least I can spread my saturated fatty tears on a nice freshly-baked baguette to soothe myself. (-; If you wanted to call someone a “crybaby” for real, I think it would be more common to call them un llorón o una llorona. My Spanish sources can correct me if I’m wrong.

la manzana — apple
[Uno, hablando en su móvil:] No pude encontrar un lugar para aparcar. [Otro, en la línea:] Tienes que tener prisa… ¡Da otra vuelta a la manzana! — I tried to trick you here, this is not really a colloquial expression. So sorry, he’s not saying: “Hurry up and give that crazy old apple the once over…again!” No, no. It’s simple: another definition of manzana is — you guessed it — block, as in a city block. So: “give the block another go-around.” Ah! But once you’ve finished “polishing up the block” by driving around and around it, you might offer it to your favourite profesor o profesora de español and you’ll become the apple of their eye! ¿Qué?

Okay — a quirky “left-fielder” here for you… Why is the “cheek muscle” so important in Spanish? Ah, I should say the “cheek mussel”. The tenuous connection here is that both words are very similar en español. La mejilla is the cheek (the facial variety, not la nalga), and un mejillón is a mussel, that little thing that boils up nicely in white wine with olive oil and garlic. (can you tell I’m hungry as I write this?)

Apparently the English word “peach” (and the similar French pêche) comes from medieval Latin, from a word that literally meant “Persian”, as in “Persian apple”. I don’t find it a very exciting word, at least not compared to one of my favourite words in Spanish so far. It’s so fun to say (un peu comme pamplemousse en français). Check-moi ça:
el melocotón — peach (go on, say it en voz alta a few times!)
Now, I don’t feel the need to make a sentence with this, because it’s already too darn sweet on its own. But apparently this name also comes from the good old Latin: malum cotonĭum, which means quince, whose trunk would have other species (de la familia de las Rosáceas) grafted in to get the best peach varieties. Also genetically related is another fruit with another great name in Spanish: el albaricoque, which is an apricot.

el melón — melon
We use “melons” in a rather rude way in English, and you can (assuming you want to be equally rude in a language you’re far from mastering) use it the same way en español. But it can also refer to the good old noggin. I’d write an example, pero no me funciona el melón.

¡Luego, chiquillos!