¡No te hagas guaje!
So, the New Year is beginning to settle in and you dutifully attended the Rosca de Reyes bread-eating ritual. Right? Do you remember how everyone asked for tiny little pieces, not so much because they were on a diet as because they didn’t want to get stuck with the little plastic doll? If you got it, and you probably did, because they are putting between 25 and 8,769 little dolls in the Roscas these days (depending on the size of the Ministry you work at), that means that on February 2nd, Ground-Hog Day, better known here as the Feast of the Virgin of the Candelaria, you must show up at work with the tamales and atole.
So it beter not occur to you to hacerte rosca. The word rosca means, basically, any circular bread or cake with a hole in the middle. That’s why in Spain doughnuts are rosquillas (little roscas) and not donas, like we say here in imitation of the English word. Which is better? Depends if you like Dunkin’ Donuts or Daylight Donuts. I, personally, don’t really care. They both make you (me) fat.
Rosca is also the thread of a screw, from which we deduce that every time a spiral comes around full turn, that is also a rosca, which has nothing do to with the phrase hacerse rosca. You, see, that’s precisely what I’ve been doing by going off on this tangent — doughnuts and spirals and whatnot — thereby avoiding the business at hand, which is my true responsibility while writing this column.
Because hacerse rosca, you see, means something like hacerse guaje (and we’ll come back to this later), being oblivious to what one is supposed to do, like when your mother used to tell you to clean up your room and you made like you didn’t hear her. Where does this come from? Probably from the idea that when something, especially animals, pulls itself into a circle, it does so in order to become impervious to the outside world, whether that mean predators, family responsibilities, or work. So it’s not flattering if someone says that you’ve been haciéndote rosca. Open up to the world, accept the fact that you were on the receiving end of one of those little, white plastic dolls, even if you did swallow it as soon as your teeth sent an urgent message to your brain in the sense that you’d have to cough up a small fortune at the tamale shop.
Hacerse guaje, on the other hand, is worse than hacerse rosca, because hacerse guaje is hacerse tonto: to play the fool. One thing is to pretend you’re not there, like an ostrich. In that case, you would say that your are pretending to be invisible, hacerse el invisible. (Don’t forget the definite article el. Without the “el”, hacerse invisible would really mean to become invisible.)
A classic example of someone who se hace guaje is the prefect Louis in the movie Casablanca, who has just closed down Rick’s Place while repeating “I am shocked, shocked.” Then he is handed his winnings, which he deftly pockets. Louis se ha hecho guaje: he has pretended that there was nothing strange about collecting winnings after closing down a gambling operation.
¡No te hagas guaje! is the complete sentence, which reminds me of a very similar phrase: hacerse güey. But be careful here, because although not obscene, it is still not polite speech in spite of the fact that it has moved up the economic and social ladder in recent years. If you really are upset with someone because they absolutely and totally eluded his or her responsibility, you would say se hizo güey. The word güey is a vulgar derivation of the word buey, meaning ox. And oxen, as you may recall from your days on the farm, are not the smartest animals in the world.
Unfortunately, nowadays one can hear people, especially young people, use the word güey as a simple reinforcer, as in “Oye, güey, qué vas a hacer, güey”, and the other guy will reply “Nada, güey. ¿Tú, qué vas a hacer, güey?” Translation: “Hey, [reinforcer], what are you going to do, [reinforcer]”. “Nothing, [reinforcer], what are you going to do, [reinforcer]”? This is not inspired speech and only denotes lack of vocabulary, ideas and things to do…
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