Joy of Spanish
En gustos se rompen géneros
Most people have a hard time concentrating. If you find when taking a class that your mind tends to wander toward what’s going on outside the window, it could be said in Spanish that you have “one eye on the cat and the other on the scribbling.” Yes: tienes un ojo al gato, y otro al garabato. Notice how the rhyme makes it work nicely. That, plus the fact that cats have nothing to do with scribbling makes it a wonderfully expressive idiom. It can also be applied to someone who is overseeing or keeping track of two (or more) different things at the same time. For instance, let’s say that your eleven-year old is doing her homework while her eyes and ears are peeled on The Simpsons (not the OJ variety, but the cartoon version of modern, middle, English-speaking America). You might say que tiene un ojo al gato, y otro al garabato. It remains to be seen, of course, whether her homework was getting a fair shake. I, for one, doubt it.
Another way of expressing a similar phenomenon is to say that someone “is everyplace, except at mass.” This goes a little further, of course, because in this case one not only splits his or her attention, but seems to be thinking about just everything except the matter at hand: está en todo, menos en misa.
When we finally decide to actually pay attention to the person who is franticly trying to explain something to us, we turn and tell him or her in English that “we are all ears.” It’s exactly the same in Spanish: Soy todo oídos.
While we’re on the subject of ears, this might be a good opportunity to clear up a finer point of anatomy. In English, we have the outer ear, the middle ear, and the inner ear. The sense in itself is “hearing.” (If someone is hard of hearing, we say in Spanish that the person is sordo. If someone is really deaf, the popular saying goes like this: es más sordo que una tapia.) The word for the outer ear is oreja, and the rest of the apparatus — the internal parts — are the oído, as well as “hearing.” If you want to say that you have good hearing, or a good ear, you’d say tengo buen oído. These are the rest of the senses: olfato (smell), tacto (touch), gusto (taste), vista (sight). There are several good sayings that go along with them. If you’re a talent scout, you must have a good sense of smell in Spanish: Juan tiene buen olfato para escoger a los mejores (“Juan is good at ‘smelling out’ the best.”) When you recognize that some people absolutely loved the movie that you thought was a real loser, you wax philosophical and say en gustos se rompen géneros. The idiom is practically impossible to translate literally. The word géneros, in this case, usually translated as genres — as in “novel,” “poetry,” “essay,” etc. — probably is closer to what is known as “mind-sets.” If we look at the phrase this way we can do a better job translating it: “There’s no telling in matters of taste.” Meaning, of course, that there is no monolithic or foolproof way of predicting what people may think about a work of art: mindsets are broken when it comes to creative endeavors.
Then there’s the world-famous hasta la vista, popularized by Arnold Schwarzenneger’s hasta la vista, baby. But it was common in colloquial English much before that, the only problem being that it is hardly used in Mexico. It’s more of a peninsular thing. On this side of the ocean people tend to say hasta luego, nos vemos, adiós, que estés bien, te cuidas. One wisecracker, after someone said to him nos vemos (“we’ll be seeing each other”), he replied: No si yo te veo primero (“Not if I see you first.”) Real funny guy.
The word “sight” brings to mind the English saying “out of sight, out of mind,” which has a twisted-up equivalent in Spanish: amor de lejos, amor de pendejos. That particular phrase is off-key. When said in polite company, one goes no further than “pen…”. People know how it ends. Be that as it may, notice that it rhymes, like un ojo al gato, y otro al garabato. It’s twisted up because it means that only a fool loves from afar, while in English it means that when the loved one is geographically distant, he or she is out of the picture entirely. In other words, they essentially mean the same thing, only that they do it from opposite directions. The flip side of this saying is “absence makes the heart grow fonder,” but I still haven’t found a parallel expression in Spanish.
Both “sight” and “vision” are vista. If one has his or her eyes checked, they get un examen de la vista (an eye examination). If you have good vision, tienes buena vista. The word visión is “vision” only in the sense of “the act or power of anticipating that which will or may come to be: prophetic vision,” or “an experience in which a personage, thing, or event appears vividly or credibly to the mind, although not actually present, often under the influence of a divine or other agency: a heavenly messenger appearing in a vision.” When George Bush senior (not “W” who, fortunately for this planet, will soon be out of office) had his problem with “the vision thing,” he had a run-in with a lack of visión, not vista.
One last observation, and this has to do with tacto. Latin peoples tend to touch each other much more than cultures hailing from more northern lattitudes. What might be understood as sexual harassment in the US or UK probably isn’t in Mexico. People also tend to stand closer to each other when speaking. This is not tactless, and people don’t get touchy about it. In short, cultures that originated around the Mediterranean sea (modern-day Italy, France, Spain, Turkey, Israel, North Africa, etc.) aren’t naturally uptight about their bodies. Mexico and the rest of Spanish and Portuguese-speaking America is Mediterranean in this sense.
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