Word of the Day: Diantres

¡Diantres! is what you might hear an old woman say out of surprise in Costa Rica. It's a euphemism for diablos or demonios, and is the etiquette-equivalent of saying 'heck' instead of 'hell' in English.

I lived with a religious family in Costa Rica, and the mother would often say diantres. After I while I had to know what that really meant. Then, after knowing that it meant 'devils' or 'demons', I started blaming everything on "los diantres". Whenever I couldn't find something in my room, I would decry the mischevity of those darned "diantres" that were hiding my shit. The family got a kick out of it.

Word of the Day: Maicero

Maicero comes from the word for corn, maíz, and literally means 'corn producer'. However, it is used as a pejorative term for a rural campesino, meaning 'hillbilly' or 'country bumpkin'. The connotation is very negative, essentially like 'hick' and 'redneck' in the English language, but without the playful benignness that is attributed to these words as a result of recent popular culture. (Will anyone doubt that the "Blue Collar Comedy" guys have made being a hick a lot hipper?)

Word of the Day: Apretar

Literally meaning 'to tighten' or 'to squeeze', apretar comes to mean 'to kiss one's boyfriend or girlfriend' in Costa Rican Spanish.

Apretar is often mispronounced in the present indicative form.

The verb, in standard form, calls for a stem change ('-e-' to '-ie-') when the stem is the tonic syllable. For example, the third person singluar form would be 'aprieta', or 'aprietan' in the third person plural form. However, many ticos will say 'apreta' and 'apretan' for these verb forms, respetively. This is a common mistake found in other countries as well.

Apretado in Costa Rica can also signify a homemade frozen treat made from a base of either water or powdered milk, and one of many flavors of syrup. The contents are placed in a plastic sandwich baggie and then frozen. To eat it you simply bite a small opening from one of the two points in the bottom of the plastic bag, and suck out the contents from the makeshift teat. This apretado treat is called chiribisco [spelling?] in many parts of Costa Rica.

Costa Rican Spanish Word of the Day: Diino

I have a hard time even calling this a word, but it might be worth noting that [dino] with a slightly prolonged 'i' sound will informally refer to the Spanish divino. A woman in my community once told me that a painting was "super diino". As any normal human being would do, I gave her a funny look. When I asked her what the heck that was, all the other women in the room were in disbelief that I hadn't heard the word before.

Gauging their reaction, maybe it's a more common word than I might think. Maybe it's just a word that women use amongst themselves. Also, perhaps it's a word that is used in other countries, but Costa Rica is the only place where I was able to earn a woman's trust enough to hear her use such informal language with me.

Either way, it's pretty messed up. I wouldn't try using this word. You might get some funny looks.

Peace,

Thomas

Costa Rican Spanish Word of the Day: Si Dios Quiere

Literally translated as "if God wants" (or the more idiomatically correct "God willing" in English), 'si Dios quiere' is an expression that has permeated Costa Rican language and culture.

This expression often throws foreigners through a loop, whether they're believers or not. Many ticos will start or end the future projection of just about anything with 'si Dios quiere' (or 'si Dios permite'). While most people wouldn't have a problem with this, some ticos go a step further to add it onto your sentence when you--wittingly or not--leave it out.

I recall a specific instance when I was telling my neighbor about my graduate school plans. He nodded his head in agreement and said "Sí, si Dios quiere". If it were simply an involuntary cultural reaction I wouldn't have thought much of it, but in this case he was clearly calling attention to my omission of God in the equation.

I am personally not critical of the expression. (Even if I were, my quibbling would be nothing short of futile.) However, others have argued that the pervasiveness of the expression is a sign of--if not an actual cause of--an overreliance on faith and hope instead of self-determination in tico culture. In order to capture this attitude, I wrote the following parody for an underground Peace Corps Costa Rica fake newspaper, "The Times of Tico", which I authored while in the country: "Son's Laziness Mistaken for the Will of God".

So Long, Diphthong!

In Costa Rica I have noticed the elimination of diphthongs in certain words. For example, the word achiote (crushed annato seeds made into a paste for red food coloring) is most often pronounced [achote], effectively cutting off the '-io-' diphthong.

This isn't the only strange vowel-related phenomenon I've encountered. I wrote about the weakening of strong vowels in my article, "Not the King's Spanish". Check it out.

Pura Vida,

Thomas

Consonant Assimilation

This linguistic phenomenon is not limited to Spanish, and certainly not to Costa Rica, but it nonetheless rears its ugly head in interesting ways in Costa Rica. To catch you up to speed, there are several cases in Spanish when consonants change their sounds based on the letter that follows. (We're not just talking about letters, but also phonemes, but I'll just call them letters for the sake of simplicity.) Consider the following examples:

The word 'rasgo' means physical characteristic or trait. The 's', which is normally an unvoiced sibilant, becomes a voiced sibilant like the 'z' in the English word 'zoo' because the 'g' that follows is a voiced consonant. This is consonant assimilation.

Another common example of consonant assimilation is the assimilation of 'n', an alveolar nasal consonant, to an 'm', a bilabial nasal consonant. In the noun phrase 'un barco' (a boat) the 'n', which is normally formed by pressing your tongue against your alveolar ridge just behind your upper front teeth, becomes a bilabial 'm' because the consonant the follows ('b') is also bilabial.

Anyway, I was prompted to think of this consonant assimilation when I came across a sign outside of the movie theater in Ciudad Quesada de San Carlos. The sign read 'Niños del Honbre', which according to the proper spelling of the words would be 'Niños del Hombre'. This was not the first time I had seen this misspelling, but it was perhaps the third time, and was what compelled me to consider it something more than a typo (or a 'write-o' or a 'placing letters on the sign outside of a movie theater...-o'). I can only explain it as a hypercorrection certain native speakers employ when they hear an 'm' but think they're supposed to write an 'n'. In Spanish you will always write 'un barco', even though there's an 'm' sound. On the other hand, within single words, you can NEVER have an 'n' before a 'b' or a 'p'. It's a rule. (We also have this rule in English; e.g., incoherent, but then imperfection.) So, when the 'n' is separated from the 'b' or 'p' by a word break, then it remains an 'n', but within the same word as a 'b' or a 'p', it simply can't be a written 'n'. My conjecture is that whichever case rings truer in the mind of a less-than-perfect speller is the one that is applied to the other case. It makes perfect sense to me that a Spanish speaker would sooner misspell 'hombre' than he would 'un', the latter of which is as essential to Spanish as 'a' or 'an' is to English. If this is true, then the misspelling of 'hombre' should be seen as a hypercorrection of the 'n' remaining an 'n' in the case of 'un barco' where it is pronounced like an 'm'.

In case you want another case of consonant assimilation in Spanish, here it is:

In the word 'banco' the 'n' takes on the sound of the 'ng' in the English word 'gong'. This happens because the 'n' will always assimilate to a velar 'c', 'k', or 'g' by becoming a velar 'ng'.

Pura Vida