¡Cría cuervos…!Last week we only started to explore the vast reserves of animal sayings in Spanish. As a matter of fact, we barely scratched the surface. Before we had to call it a day, we used the popular saying “en menos que canta un gallo”, which means “before you know it” or “right away.” Chickens and roosters are very important in the lore of Spanish-speaking countries. Besides en menos que canta un gallo, we also saw how one is said to have “eaten gallo” when one is in an ornery or fighting mood: Parece que desayunaste gallo. Here are three more handy expressions having to do with these egg-laying animals: If Miss Serafina’s son, for example, just graduated medical school, we might make the following comment: ¡Mira, nomás, qué culeca anda doña Serafina! If the one strutting proudly around is a man, or a boy, we would use the masculine form culeco. You may have noticed how close culeco is to cluck in English. I don’t know if this is a simple coincidence or if it is due to onomatopoeia, which is the rhetorical term we use for a word that sounds similar to what it is supposed to represent, like bang or grumble. These words are onomatopoetic. The sound chickens make when they roost is vaguely similar to cluck-cluck, or culeco. In view of this, they are most probably cases of onomatopoeia. In English cluck is a noun or a verb, but culeco(a) is an adjective. The “offical” word is clue¬co(a), but few people in America use this spelling and pronunciation. The verb is clocar or cloquear.
So if someone is strutting around and boasting about all the wonderful things his or her children do, si andan culecos, we also say that these people se creen la mamá de los pollitos, which means — literally — that they believe they are the mother of the chicks. This expression is commonly used in a derogatory sense when one feels that someone else is conceited: “¡Ay, qué insoportable anda María; se cree la mamá de los pollitos!” (“María is unbearable; she thinks she’s really hot stuff!”) But if the person involved uses it to describe him or herself — ¡me siento como la mamá de los pollitos! — it is understood as a perfectly innocent acknowledgment of one’s being proud about this or that.
Another derogatory way of saying someone is stuck up, is the phrase se cree la divina garza envuelta en huevo. Many times people just use the first part of the phrase “se cree la divina garza,” but the complete sentence has a much greater impact because the image it conjures up is so ridiculous: he (or she) thinks he’s (she’s) the divine heron wrapped in egg. I imagine that this “egg” is probably whipped egg white, or merengue, so just imagine this stuffy heron strutting into a restaurant with a fur coat that looks like egg white fresh out of the beater while Ella Fitzgerald sings Johnny Mercer’s “Too Marvelous for Words” with her oh-so-seductive alto. Well that’s the divina garza envuelta en huevo. But not all is conceit and aggressiveness with these animals. If someone is running around, higgledy piggledy, not knowing if he or she is coming or going, only that they are in a tremendous hurry, we say — like in English — that they are running around like a chicken without a head: Gerardo anda como gallina degollada.
Another interesting bird is the crow, the cuervo. And if you reap what you have sown, and your harvest has turned against you, there is a very special saying that can be used: Cría cuervos y te sacarán los ojos. (“Raise crows and they’ll pick your eyes out.”) Many times people will leave it at “Cría cuervos…,” because most people understand what comes after that. Usually this expression is used when we want to illustrate how people can be ungrateful or even treacherous after we’ve helped them handsomely.
Another good one with crows is “no puede ser el cuervo más negro que las alas”, or “the crow can’t be blacker than its wings,” meaning that things can’t get worse than they already are (supposing, of course, that the worst has already come to pass), so we really have nothing to be afraid of any longer.
Two more quickies with birds: “Una golondrina no hace verano” (one swallow doesn’t mean it’s Summer), meaning that if something happens once, usually something good, that doesn’t mean that it will happen again or often, or that things have taken a definite change for the better. And when capital investments fly away in bad times, we call them capitales golondrinos, because they tend to migrate instead of staying put where they can really be used to create stable, job-producing industries.
We still have about a paragraph left, so I’ll stick in this last ornithological entry: “ser un pájaro de cuenta,” as in “Ese fulano que acaban de capturar ya era un pájaro de cuenta,”meaning that the guy they just captured has a criminal record, something of a “jail bird” I guess. Next week we’ll explore this linguistic zoo even further.
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