Joy of Spanish
An extremely large shirt
After last week’s article, in which we tried to make sense of what could easily be considered a grammatical mishmash — trying to make sense out of direct and indirect object pronouns in the third person (le, lo, and se to be exact) — I must confess that Mr. Allard still has a few questions up his sleeve, but we’ll have to postpone them for the time being while we get back to our usual fare of everyday expressions. The reason is simple: grammar is fascinating, but it turns most people off, so we’ll just have to administer it in easy-to-swallow doses, once in a while, like maybe the week after next, unless I get about 4,876 e-mails demanding equal time and justice for Spanish grammar! I’d be more than happy to comply. But meanwhile, I don’t want to climb into a shirt measuring eleven rods, or approximately 30.8 feet, or to put it conveniently into metric: around 9.2 meters, give or take a few millimeters.
“What…,” you cry out in disbelief, “…on Earth is this guy talking about?” Okay, okay. I admit it. This whole thing was a way of working up to a common saying in Mexico and all over the Spanish-speaking world: meterse en [una] camisa de once varas, which literally means to get into, or climb into, a shirt with the above-quoted measurements. Pretty big, huh?
As usual, the literal translation is perfectly ridiculous. The sense, however, is quite clear: to meterse en una camisa de once varas means to get mixed up in a situation that makes things unnecessarily complicated for the one getting involved. Sort of like what happened last week when I was trying to explain the shades of gray that distinguish lo from le when both are intended to be direct object pronouns. It’s really easy when you already understand it, but to try to explain such a thing in a few lines in a column in cyberspace, especially if you don’t know exactly who you’re talking to or what they might have assimilated over the years in the way of grammar, is really getting in over your head, or my head in this case. So, me metí en camisa de once varas last week, for which I apologize.
The phrase can be used in just about any situation. It can be a warning, for example: No te metas en una camisa de once varas. Or a question: ¿Por qué te vas a meter en camisa de once varas? Or a simple declaration of reality: Ya me metí en una camisa de once varas.
The story behind this saying is even more interesting than the saying itself. According to Gregorio Doval — who goes about his life researching this sort of thing — in his book Del hecho al dicho (Ediciones del Prado, 1995), it has to do with the practice of adoption during the Middle Ages. It goes like this:
During the adoption ceremony, the new father would wear an oversized shirt, under which he would place the adopted child, whose head would stick out of the same large neck-hole as his new father’s. With the adopted child in his arms, he would give him a kiss, thereby confirming publicly the confirmation of the adoption.
So where does they saying fit in? It would seem that the act of adoption is somewhat risky for all involved. It can even become quite troublesome (as rearing children usually is), and the fact that one didn’t really have to get into that kind of situation, the fact that one could easily have avoided the whole rigmarole by just not getting involved, probably led to the coining of the saying: the act of climbing into one of these large shirts would almost be synonymous with getting into a problem unnecessarily. The dimensions of the shirt itself, eleven rods or more than 9 meters of cloth, is of course an exaggeration. Extra-large would be more than ample for most people.
Another expression which is of similar although not the exact same meaning, is to meterse [uno] en un berenjenal, or to get into an eggplant patch. This particular fruit is quite large and would serve well as part of an obstacle course. So just imagine having to run full speed through a berenjenal. Not an easy thing to do, especially since eggplants have horizontally crawling stems and prickly thorns on their leaves; one could easily get hung up in this sort of situation.
One might say, for example, that by buying an apartment building whose occupants are still inside is tantamount to getting into an eggplant patch. “¡En qué berenjenal me metí!”, exclaimed the exasperated buyer (“What a mess I’ve gotten into!”). “¡Me va a costar uno y la mitad del otro arreglar este problema!” (“It’s going to cost me ‘one’ and half of the ‘other’ to get out of this problem!”)
This turn of phrase, costarle uno y la mitad del otro, refers to the dearest part of the masculine anatomy known commonly as “the family jewels,” or huevos: eggs. When something is going to be truly difficult, when it is going to hurt us — whether financially or spiritually — to go through with something, we can use the phrase quoted above. For obvious reasons, though, it is mostly used by men, although when used by women, ovarios (ovaries) are usually mentioned instead of huevos, which is interesting when one considers that women are the egg-bearers of the species. Be that as it may, one should always remember that in Spanish men have eggs too.
One more note: besides referring to the family jewels, the phrase un huevo can also mean “an awful lot.” Someone might ask how much a pair of brothers made thanks to their relationship to an ex-president’s wife. “Un huevo,” would be a good answer since before that presidency they were poor; now they are anything but… (Cough-cough.) But… by getting into this type of expression, once again I’ve landed in a berenjenal, which was totally unnecessary. In other words, me metí en una camisa de once varas.
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