Word of the Day: Largo

In Costa Rica largo not only means 'long', but it's also a very common word to mean 'far' or 'far away' (instead of using the more common Spanish word, 'lejos'.)

So instead of saying "la iglesia está muy lejos" (The church is very far away) you could say "la iglesia está muy largo", which would mean the exact same thing to a Costa Rican. (Of course, if a Costa Rican frowns upon this usage, it won't mean the exact same thing to him because of his negative feelings toward it.)

Notice that in my example iglesia, which is femenine, does not change largo--which is typically an adjective--into its femenine form. That's because in this case largo isn't an adjective, but an adverb, which is gender neutral. Essentially, largo assimilates to the part of speech of the word it's replacing, lejos (a genderless adverb).

Rapu Davi (Pura Vida),

Tomás