Palabritas del día - escurría
The “End of Food” has come at last…
It’s been awhile since I did one of these vocabulary posts…but just because I wasn’t posting doesn’t mean I stopped learning my vocab! No…in fact, today I finally finished the last of “los alimentos”. Obviously I still don’t know every food-related Spanish word, but I found the menus made a lot more sense during my last trip to Spain. A number of the terms I learned are highly “cultural” — referring to things we don’t eat or aren’t even available here (e.g. la mojama, la sobrasada, el choco). It’s been a long haul (about two months), and 310 words later I’m at the end of the food words!
(The verb escurrir doesn’t rhyme with día, so I took the liberty of conjugating it in the pretérito imperfecto…”I used to drain…”)
escurrir — to drain. I found this hard to remember. My “trick” (let me know if you have a better one!) is that you’re letting the water escape down the drain. If I get the first part of the word, the rest usually is easy.
rebanar — to slice or cut up. Another non-obvious one! There is bañar (to bathe), but no banar, so re-banar can’t help us. My own memorization trick uses the French word rabais, which is a discount or reduction (i.e. “cut”) in the price. May be odd, but works for me.
rebañar — no, it doesn’t mean to “bathe again”, but to wipe clean or mop up. Martín tenía tan hambre que rebañó el plato limpia como una patena. — Martin was so hungry he practically licked the plate clean. (A patena — paten in English — is a fancy plate used to serve communion, so limpia como una patena is a colloquial expression which obviously expresses extreme cleanliness. I suppose we’d translate this to “clean as a whistle”, but I’m not sure they use those in communion. Also, frankly I’m not sure whistles represent the best hygienic role models!) Funny how one little accent can give something a completely different meaning. Much to my chagrin, this word still can’t trace its origin to bañar! In fact, it confusingly shares its Latin origin with the previous word, which has a completely different meaning… Sigh.