Vergazo

Costa Ricans will often use the word vergazo to mean a strong punch with a fist. This is a colloquial term you might hear in a rural cantina. Keep in mind that the word verga means 'dick'. So, this isn't exactly church language. (Of course, punching people isn't exactly church behavior either.)

Word of the Day: Tiquete

Tiquete is the most common Costa Rican word for ticket. Most people will understand the word boleto, especially in context, but whenever it's a question of a bus ticket or an plane ticket, you'll almost always hear tiquete.

Note: In Costa Rica people will also use the term pasaje, which means 'passage' and can be used interchangeably with tiquete in most cases. One exception would be when you're referring directly to the physical ticket itself, in which case tiquete would be most appropriate.

Va a llover, it's raining

Often when it rained in the rural area where I lived, someone would say "va a llover". It doesn't take much knowledge of Spanish to recognize this as a future tense. So, why would people say that it's going to rain right when it starts raining? It's anyone's guess, but here's mine:

This phrase is likely a projection of continued rain throughout the day. If it starts raining, and the outlook for the foreseeable hours in the day look grim, people will predict a considerable amount of rainfall, using only a three-word prhase.

I can respect this type of communication. People tend to shorten language when they're among people of similar background. Heck, why not use a few words when that's all you need to get your point across? With that said, I went through several months of frustration because of my relative lack of local understanding. For example, people would always tell me that I need to go para arriba [parriba] or para abajo [pabajo] to go where I needed to go. To me, up or down didn't mean much because I was unfamiliar with the relative altitudes of different villages. What seemed obvious to all the locals was a great mystery to me.

But with time I learned the subtleties of language in my rural corner of Costa Rica. Eventually, instead of saying that the rain will probably last till tomorrow morning, I learned to kick back and say "va a llover". And it felt good.

Word of the Day: Estudiar

It's been a while since I've posted here. I suppose I should make things clear; I don't have time to post a new word every day, but I will do so as much as possible. It will probably end up being two or three times per week. So, here we go...

Estudiar, of course, means 'to study', but Costa Ricans will also use the word to mean 'to read'. When I got to the country and had stretches of time with little to do but to read, people would often apologize that they didn't mean to interrupt me while I was "studying". I would often respond, "I'm only reading". This seemed to confuse them. Before long I accepted that reading and studying are one and the same to many Costa Ricans. Since I was living in mostly rural areas, most people I knew read only when they had to.

My theory is that this correlation between academic work and reading was so strong that people started melding the two activities together in language. I haven't tested this conjecture scientifically, but it seems the most plausible to me. Does anyone have more intimate knowledge of this usage?

Word of the Day: Millonario

You probably won't hear this while you're traveling in Costa Rica, but Costa Ricans will use the word millonario all the time in reference to rich people.

While it's easy to just say that millonario is 'millionaire', doing so would be highly inaccurate. In Costa Rica a US dollar is worth about 500 colones. Consequently, you'd only need about $2,000 in local currency to be a millionaire in the most simplistic literal sense of the word. By such a measure, nearly anyone who owns a home would be a millonario. This is obviously not what is meant by millonario.

At the same time, neither do you need to have a million dollars to be considered millonario. A cool million is something that most ticos can't even imagine. To live the lifestyle of the vast majority of Costa Ricans, one wouldn't need that much money in an entire lifetime, much less have that in net worth at a given time.

To make a long story short, millonario is simply a symbolic term for an extremely rich person, someone with many millions of colones in the bank.

Let me know in the comments if you have any questions.

Word of the Day: Olla de Carne

Olla de carne, literally a 'pot of meat', is a Costa Rican stew made with beef and vegetables. The vegetables are primarily starchy tubers like yuca (yucca), tiquisque, malanga, as well as a light and watery vegetable called chayote.

Funny Shirts in Costa Rica

I would make this blog about funny t-shirts in Costa Rica if I had the temerity to snap photos of strangers in the street. Costa Ricans often wear t-shirts with English writing on them, ones they purchase from the local Ropa Americana store (which is a store that carries second-hand clothes from the United States). Often the locals don't understand what's on the t-shirts. Case in point, I saw an older (white) man strolling down a main walkway in San José donning a shirt that read:

"Look out: Here comes one pissed off black woman"

You might not find gems like this every day in Costa Rica, but the prevalence of North American clothing mixed with the subtleties of a foreign language make situations like these all but inevitable. If you spend enough time in Costa Rica, you're bound to get a few chuckles here and there from ironic clothing.

It's quite common to see people wearing old sports t-shirts and jerseys for teams that are explicitly for the opposite sex of the person wearing it. You might also see someone wearing a humorous t-shirt that says, "Smooth Operator" or "Why am I so thirsty if I drank so much last night"? In most of these occasions when I have known the person wearing the t-shirt, the t-shirt owner did not fully understand the message and, in many cases, would not have purchased the t-shirt having known what it meant.

If you have any ironic t-shirt stories from Costa Rica or elsewhere, please share in the comments.

Word of the Day: Filo

Filo means the edge of a blade in Spanish, but in Costa Rica it is also slang for 'hunger'.

Ex: ¿Tiene (Ud.) mucho filo?

Translation: Are you really hungry?

Word of the Day: Soda

It's not quite what you expect. Soda is Costa Rican for diner. Sodas in Costa Rica won't give you a menu because the fare is pretty standard from one place to the next. Most places will send a waitress (salonera) to your table and ask you to simply come up with your order on your own.

Most people will order a "casado", which is a fixed plate that consists of rice, beans, a few sides, some plantains (green or ripe), and your choice of meat.

The sides can consist of a chopped up casserole dish called "picadillo" or an "ensalada rusa" (Russian salad), which consists of chopped up beets and hard-boiled eggs in a creamy sauce.

The meat choices can include the following:

• Carne en salsa (literally "meat in sauce", kind of like a thick stew or a pot roast)
• Pollo en salsa (usually a single piece of chicken cooked in a light chicken gravy)
• Pollo frito (a piece of fried chicken)
• Pescado (fish, most often fried)
• Chuleta (pork chop)

When ordering a casado you only need to say "un casado con ______", with the blank filled by one of the aforementioned meats. "Un casado con chuleta", for example, would be what you order if you want the fixed meal with a pork chop. You can also order a "un casado vegetariano", which will most likely be the typical base-case casado with just more of everything, but no meat of course.

You can also order items a la carte. The only difficulty is that you have to spell everything out for the waitress. (As a side note, yes, most soda waitstaff is female.) For example, you could say:

"Regáleme arroz, frijoles, pollo en salsa, unos maduros, ensalada rusa y un huevo frito"

Translation: "Gift me rice, beans, chicken in sauce, some ripe plantains, Russian salad, and a fried egg"

(Please note that "regalar", which literally means "to gift", is the most common way to ask for something in Costa Rican culture, even when you intend to pay for something.)

When you're ordering a drink, you're expected to order a soft drink, coffee (if it's breakfast time), or one of their "natural" drinks called "frescos naturales". The frescos are a mixture of some natural source of flavor--usually fruit--mixed with water and sugar. You might be overwhelmed by all of your choices. Among those choices will be some of the following:

• Fresco de piña (pineapple)
• " " zanahoria (carrot)
• " " chan (the seed of the chan fruit)
• " " linaza (linseed)
• " " mango (mango)
• " " avena (oatmeal)
• " " mora (blackberry)
• " " maracuyá (passion fruit)
• " " carambola (starfruit)
• pinolillo (finely ground roasted corn and cacao)

This should be enough for you to survive your first trip to a Costa Rican soda. However, please note that your experience on the Caribbean side might be different. While the process might be quite similar, the actual food will likely be much different, but that can be the topic for another blog post.

Happy eating :)

Word of the Day: Dialecto

Dialecto is 'dialect' in Spanish, but in the rural areas of Costa Rica you might hear people referring to dialect as a language completely different from Spanish. In my area of Guatuso, people would often explain to me that the indigenous Maleku Indians spoke a different "dialect". The textbook understanding of the word would make it seem as if Maleku were a dialect of Spanish. What they mean to say is that it isn't Spanish at all. (A more pessimistic view may have the locals interpreting the Maleku language as somehow undeserving of the language status, which could be accurate for some.) It threw me off a bit the first time I heard someone say it, but I learn to tune it out when people continued to say use dialecto in this way.

Word of the Day: Comején

Comején is what ticos say for 'termite', instead of the Spanish 'termita'.

In Costa Rica when a word ends in an 'n' it sounds like a voiced velar nasal [ŋ], which is the same as the 'ng' ending in English words.

Word of the Day: Sólido

In rural areas of Costa Rica some people employ the word sólido to mean isolated, solitary. For example, a farm that doesn't have access to a road could be considered sólido.

Ex: La finca de Carlos está muy lejos del camino. Es muy sólida.

Geographically Neutral Spanish: " "...Es muy solitaria

Translation: Carlos's farm is very far from the road. It is very solitary.

My use of the word 'solitary' is not incidental. I suspect that the use of sólido arises from a confusion between 'sólido' and 'solitario', the latter of which is a proper translation for the word 'solitary'.

If you're traveling to Costa Rica you probably won't hear this word, but if you venture into the countryside, you will come across people who have come across this usage.

Word of the Day: Toldo

A toldo is a mosquito net in Costa Rican speak. A more common word in the Spanish-speaking world is mosquitero, but the Costa Ricans say toldo, which literally means 'awning' or 'canopy'.

Toldos are very important for tourists and locals alike, as the mosquito (called 'zancudo' by Costa Ricans) is the most dangerous non-human animal in the country. Dengue fever and malaria continue to rear their heads, mostly in the Pacific and Atlantic sides, respectively.

Many Costa Ricans will deny the existence of malaria in their country, but cases are documented every year. For some meaningful anecdotal evidence, let me inform you that a friend of mine contracted malaria after spending only a weekend in the Limón province. I still recommend Costa Rica to travelers and aspiring ex-pats, but you should still consult a doctor before you go to take proper precautions. When I went on vacation to Costa Rica's Atlantic coast in January I took a chloroquine-based malaria medication just in case. I will take the same measures on subsequent trips.

The "-illo" suffix

In Costa Rica, especially in the rural areas, people use the -illo diminutive suffix quite often. Since it's used liberally, the derogatory connotation does not apply--at least not in all cases and not to the same extent.

One common use, which is not unique to Costa Rica, is the use of 'chiquilla' to mean a young woman--often in a suggestive (but not inappropriate) way. Think of the word 'chick' in English with a more positive connotation.

A potential problem that arises when you use the -illo suffix is that many Spanish words change their meaning drastically when affixing -illo or -illa. For example, manzanilla isn't a little apple, but rather chamomile.

One time when I was moving tables around for a community event in a rural area, a man warned me that the tables were "pesadillas", which means that they're 'nightmares'. What he meant to say was that they are heavy, which for most Spanish speakers would be: "[las mesas] son pesadas". While I understood what he said in this context, the liberal use of the -illo suffix has the potential for creating confusing situations.

Here's a list of words to look out for, all of which have a different meaning from their suffix-less counterparts. (Keep in mind that not all of these pairs of words share the same morphological roots; for example, pandilla and panda do not share etymological origins.)

comilla (quotation mark) ≠ coma (comma)
pandilla (gang) ≠ panda (panda)
guerrilla (guerrilla) ≠ guerra (war)
sombrilla (umbrella) ≠ sombra (shade)
bombilla (light bulb, drinking straw in parts of South America) ≠ bomba (bomb)
pesadilla (nightmare) ≠ pesada (heavy)

There are countless others. These are just a few off the top of my head.

Word of the Day: Elevador

This probably won't be a difficult one for English speakers to remember. Elevador is the popular word in Costa Rica for 'elevator'. While some Costa Ricans will understand acensor, just stick to elevador. It's the only word I have ever encountered for elevator.

With this said, elevators aren't too widespread in Costa Rica. San José is the only place where they're common. I even remember staying in a five-story hotel in Ciudad Quesada de San Carlos without an elevator.

Word of the Day: Tortillera

Tortillera is Costa Rican slang for 'lesbian'. Because of the connotation of the word, people usually avoid using it to describe a woman who makes tortillas.

It isn't widely considered offensive in Costa Rica, although perhaps it should. Reason being: the words 'playo' and 'tortillera' (used for 'gay' and 'lesbian', respectively) are so commonplace in Costa Rican language that they are often used generically for homosexual people. As a result, people don't necessarily mean harm when they use the terms. However, homosexuality isn't always seen in a positive light in what is a strongly Christian (Catholic, and increasingly Evangelical) country, so playo and tortillera are often used in a negative fashion.

With that said, people will figure out for themselves what is offensive and what isn't. I have met gay people in Costa Rica who use the words playo and tortillera in a joking manner. Others might not find it so funny, so I don't recommend using these words.

Word of the Day: Naciente

Naciente is correctly used as the cognate of the English adjective "nascent".

In Costa Rica the word takes on a different meaning as a noun, referring to a natural spring that creates a small current of fresh, drinkable water. Much of the potable water in outside of San José comes from natural sources. While hiking through forests in the Costa Rican countryside I have often found nacientes. They serve as a good source of drinking water, especially when you haven't brought along enough of your own.

The Real Academia Española recognizes the noun naciente as a dinsticntly Costa Rican word. The Academy describes the gender of this noun as "ambiguous", but I have most often heard naciente preceded by feminine articles.

Word of the Day: Diario

In Costa Rica diario most often means the staple goods (mostly groceries) that one buys to sustain the family. The diario in Costa Rica consists mainly of rice and beans, and whatever fat the family uses to fry its food. (Some families use vegetable oil, but many still use the highly saturated palm fat called manteca.) These foods are often accompanied by cabbage, tomatoes, meat, and cans of tuna. In rural areas, fruits--as well as certain vegetables like yuca, chayote, corn, and elote--are often gathered/harvested locally for consumption. 

The ideas of the canasta básica--which is the basic basket of consumer goods that helps track consumer prices and quantify poverty levels--and the diario are quite closely related. In fact, you could say that the canasta básica seeks to reflect the diario of the average middle- or lower-middle-class Costa Rican family. However, these terms are by no means interchangeable. Canasta básica is an economic  (and often political) term employed by those concerned with macroeconomic issues as they relate to poverty. Diario, on the other hand, is what people use in their everyday lives in reference to their essential periodic purchases.

Vos commands in Costa Rica

As I mentioned in a recent post, Costa Ricans use the same vos form as in other parts of Central America and in South America (most notably Argentina, but excluding the vos form in Chile).

I also gave a quick introduction to vos conjugations in the present tense, but I left out the imperative form. There's an easy way to fix this, because it's really quite simple.

For the verb hablar simply cut off the 'r' at the end. What you get is hablá, with the emphasis on the last syllable. If you read my last post on the voseo you'll note that this is simply the indicative form in the present tense without the 's' at the end.

When you're walking around downtown San José you'll notice that many advertisements will use vos commands. "Entrá y ahorrá", a store might say to entice you. "Jugá y ganá", might be a sales pitch to the foolhardy lottery player. (No offense to lottery players.)

Vos commands work the same for reflexive verbs, except that there's a spelling change when only one pronoun is attached to the end. For example, to tell someone to sit down you might say sentate, with the accent in its "natural" penultimate position, eliminating the need for the tilde. The same applies for commands with direct or indirect pronouns attached, provided there's only one. (When there are two pronouns attached the tilde will always show up, as the tonic syllable always requires a written accent mark when it is the thir-to-last--or antepenultimate--within the word.)

Let me know if you have any questions. As promised, I will soon address the issues of irregular vos forms and the history of the vos pronoun.

Word of the Day: Ocupar

Ocupar, which means 'to occupy' in Spanish, also means 'to need' in Costa Rica. This is perhaps one of Costa Rica's strangest words. Since it's used in this way so often, I recommend shying away from the word ocupar to mean 'to occupy' because it will likely confuse the locals. You should use more general verbs like 'estar' instead.

To illustrate the potential confusion with this word, I was at an internet café and I asked the guy where the bathroom was, to which he asked me "ocupa el servicio"? I responded somewhat facetiously, "no, pero quiero ocuparlo pronto". He then said, "entonces, no ocupa el servicio", to which I responded "no, todavía no ocupo el servicio, pero, sí, tengo que usarlo". He then understood my urgency, but I don't think he ever understood why we had those awkward moments.

All of this just to go to the bathroom. Be mindful of this word!