¡No es enchílame otra!
Idiomatic expressions, known as modismos in Spanish, are the spice of any language’s life. Some languages’ modismos are so expressive that they work their way into others. Take Yiddish, for example. From the end of the 19th Century up until the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of Yiddish speakers flooded into the New York Metropolitan area, especially to Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. While learning English, usually from their offspring, they would naturally stick in Yiddish words and phrases here and there to spice things up. Many of these phrases are now a natural part of the English language, even outside the U.S., thanks to movies and television. As a matter of fact, nowadays it is almost exclusively known for its expressive words and phrases, and many people are surprised to find out that Yiddish is a real language that was spoken by millions all over Eastern Europe, whose flourishing literature was nipped in the bud by Hitler’s blitzkrieg against the rest of humanity. But that’s something else again.
Spanish is another language particularly graced with expressive idioms (one need only read El Quijote to be convinced of that), especially Mexican Spanish, thanks to the fact that the Conquistadors didn’t completely wipe out indigenous civilization when they invaded Moctezuma’s empire nearly 500 years ago. Unlike the English-speaking in¬vaders to the North, the Spaniards wanted cheap labor; those Indians who survived the Europeans’ diseases, lived to be baptized and trained to build the colonial cities of New Spain. Although Spaniards and Mexicans definitely speak the same language, Mexican Spanish has a distinctive flavor due not only to the many Indian words that so commonly pop up in our sentences, but also to a certain indigenous way of phrasing things, the extreme courtesy used in common dis¬course, the ever-present diminutives, the softness —suavidad— of the pronunciation, the circuitousness of sentence structure in the interest of not offending, the metaphoric use of language that has evolved into a complex code of equivalents known commonly as the albur mexicano, about which much has been said and written.
Mexican Spanish is, of course, a natural thing for Mexicans, but it isn’t for Spaniards. Among my bibliographical curiosities, I have a facsimile edition of José Sánchez Samoano’s Modismos, locuciones y términos mexicanos, originally published in 1892, in Madrid, by Manuel Minuesa de los Ríos. The facsimile was published by Miguel Ángel Porrúa, in Mexico City, one hundred years later; the presentation is by Gabriel Rosenzweig.
This small compendium of peculiarly Mexican words, phrases, and even customs, has the additional charm of being written in rhymed verse. The Asturian Sánchez Samoano is continually surprised and enchanted by the Mexican turns of phrase, and with uncommon good humor, writes about them in such a way that his Spanish compatriots might understand what Mexico is all about.
The first few pages are dedicated to explaining such common phenomena as tortillas, zarapes, pulque, chile, etc., but soon the author gets into more fertile territory when talking about how certain words are related to local custom. In a four-line composition, for example, he warns against the use of the word huevo, which in Spain only means egg:
Allí tampoco se puede
llamar a los huevos, huevos;
hay que llamarlos blanquillos,
aunque sean negros, muy negros.
The allusion, of course, is to masculine reproductive anatomy. And continuing in this vein, Sánchez Samoano rhymes about the “c” word, comparable to the “f” word in English, whose use is perfectly normal in Spain, and has nothing to do with sexual acts at all. In Mexico, however, one must be very careful when using it; that’s why most people, unfortunately, opt for using another word entirely when wanting to say “take” or “grab” or “get”: agarrar. This is unfortunate because it is always sad to lose the everyday use of a good word. The flip side of this, of course, is that we have do have the other use for it, even if it isn’t quite polite:
¿Y coger? ¡Quién lo diría!
Es un verbo empecatado;
no hay que dejarse coger
ni siquiera por la mano.
A common Mexican phrase that particularly fascinated Sánchez Samoano over a hundred years ago is one just as fresh today as it was then: enchílame otra. We use it most fre¬quently when trying to communicate the fact that something isn’t easily done. For example, if I want to say that writing a column about idioms isn’t easy, I would say Escribir una columna sobre modismos no es enchílame otra. To make an enchilada one only has to put the previously prepared chile sauce on the tortilla, which was also prepared beforehand; a piece of cake. So when something is difficult, one says it isn’t enchílame otra. This is the Asturian’s rendering of the phrase from over one hundred years ago:
El amor es lo mismo
que la enchilada,
que si al principio pica,
después agrada.
Y es tan sabrosa,
que hasta las niñas dicen:
“Enchíleme otra.”
If you would like to know more about any idiomatic expressions
you may have heard, or about any Spanish-language difficulties,
feel free to contact me at sandrocohen@gmail.com
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