El ojo de la hormiga
This article is dedicated to Jean Vaughn,
with my sincere appreciation.
Nothing is there so fascinating as a bug. And they are all over the place, especially in everyday speech. Take the lowly bedbug, for example, scientifically known as cimex lectularius. If you’ve ever had the bad fortune to have slept on a bedbug-infested mattress, you know what a pain in the… neck these insects are. There is a verb in Spanish, enchinchar, which comes from the word for bedbug: chinche. This verb admirably conveys the feeling you get when being bitten —over and over again— by these flat, wingless, bloodsucking, hemipterous insects. When someone gets on your case and continually hounds you about something, even if it’s something you are supposed to do, you say that he or she’s enchinchando. And it’s definitely not a good idea to enchinchar, because it usually makes things turn out badly. Kids are good at this, and when their parents get fed up with their continuous whining, it isn’t long before they’ll come out with a heartfelt no estén enchinchando.
Chinches, by the way, are also thumbtacks. It’s fairly easy to make the connection. In order to press a thumbtack into a bulletin board, you use — naturally — your thumb. This is also the way you squash bedbugs. Well, so much for these foul-smelling little suckers. Another great insect is the louse. These guys get in your hair, literally. There is a particular way of reconnoitering the scalp in search of these troublesome characters, which consists of poking around with your index finger, tracing small circles until… whoops!, you bump into a piojo. Then you press with thumb and index or middle finger and remove the lousy pediculus humanus (as opposed to pediculus pubis, who lives you know where).
This brief introduction to piojo lore is intended to explain the phrase hacer piojito, which is the action of fondly caressing someone’s scalp with one’s finger, as might occur between boyfriend and girlfriend, man and wife, or whatever. If I happen to like it when a beautiful woman starts sticking her fingers in my hair, you can bet I’ll tell her: “Me encanta cuando me haces piojito.”
Nowadays everybody (that’s anybody) goes to the modern movie theaters where they don’t interrupt the motion picture in the middle so everyone can stampede over to the candy counter. (This was a common and despicable practice in the 1980’s). But the old theaters, the ones where you were always in danger of losing a shoe to chewing gum or the stickiness of spilled coca-cola, had a special term of endearment: cines piojito. After watching a double bill in one of these pits, you came out scratching like crazy. Does anybody remember the Cine Gloria, right off Insurgentes?
Next on the evolutionary scale of bugginess is the ant, the hormiga, which happens to be a cognate of “formica,” the stuff your mother had put on her kitchen cabinets and table. As a matter of fact, that’s the exact word for ant in Latin (in case you’re interested, which you’re probably not). They most likely named this material formica to drive home the idea that it’s very hard and resistant, like ants, which gram-for-gram are almost for sure the most resistant creatures on the face of the Earth. Ants come in all kinds of colors, but your basic everyday ant is black, and black is the color of things when they go bad. So if something goes really bad, or if it’s about to go that way, we say it’s “becoming ant colored,” or: esto se está poniendo color de hormiga. In other words, when something se pone color de hormiga, things don’t look very good at all.
And when you are looking all over for someone, like the plumber who did a such a good job fixing your sink that you have water all over the kitchen floor and half the living room, and you can’t locate him anywhere, you say that he turned into an ant’s eye: se hizo ojo de hormiga. To understand this idiom, all you have to do is imagine the size of an ant’s eye and how difficult it would be to find one, especially if it’s detached from the ant. So if you don’t want anyone to find you, hazte ojo de hormiga, make yourself into an ant’s eye. You’ll be fine.
There is also a particular way of stealing things that pertains to these insects. Do you remember those wonderful Saturday-morning cartoons from the 60’s, when armies of ants showed up at picnics and made off with everything, including the cake? Their modus operandi was to take all, but one item at a time, surreptitiously, in such a way that nobody noticed until everything was gone. Great stuff. This, in Spanish, is called robo hormiga, or “ant-style stealing.” We once had a housekeeper who robbed us blind this way. After a couple of years we started suspecting something was amiss, and after inventorying the pantry and documenting real mischief, we decided to open the locker in her room. Boy, did I feel guilty about that! Or at least until we found everything from our silverware to pantyhose and a supermarket’s worth of foodstuffs that were probably earmarked for re-sale in the outside world. El robo hormiga isn’t spectacular unless you get to see the spoils all at once, which is rare. We only saw a fraction of what fell through the cracks.
Next week we’ll continue up and down the evolutionary ladder of insect linguistics because there are still a good deal of useful expressions to explore, así que no se haga ojo de hormiga, and I’ll see you next week.
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