¡Quiúbole!
Mexican Spanish is deliciously peppered with many expressions that, at first, may be disconcerting for the newcomer to the language and the country. One of the most common is “¿Qué pasó?” (literally: What happened?). The closest living relative of this expression is the 60’s and 70’s greeting “What’s happ’nin’!”, popular with Afro-Americans and university students. As a matter of fact, within these same communities in the United States, the Spanish version of What’s happ’nin’ also became fashionable and everyone understood it: ¿Qué pasa?
In Mexico, when one greets a friend with the extremely familiar ¿Qué pasó?, he or she isn’t really asking what happened. A translation much closer to the mark would be “How have you been?” The expression does, of course, carry the semantic weight associated with the idea of things that occur in reality. So when saying ¿Qué pasó?, besides asking how our friends have been, we are also inquiring as to what’s new and what they’ve been up to (What’s up?). The proof can be found in the com¬mon multiple greeting of “¿Qué pasó? ¿Cómo has estado?” In other words, if one wants to know the state of our friend’s health, ¿Qué pasó? is definitely not enough.
Another extremely common greeting among friends and fairly good acquaintances is ¡Quiúbole! (with its variant ¡Quióbole!), whose literal translation would have to be something like “What was there that happened to you?”, which of course makes no sense at all. ¡Quiúbole! comes from the expression ¡Quiubo!, which in turn comes from ¿Qué hubo? (“What was there?”, meaning “What happened?”), first cousin to ¿Qué pasó? The ¡Quiúbole! version is even less formal than ¿Qué pasó?, and it tends to be much more enthusiastic. The “le” on the end doesn’t really point to an indirect object, as grammar would have it. As a matter of fact, its use is hardly grammatical at all. It does refer to the person with whom we are speaking, but it is not an indirect object pronoun as one might assume. This “le,” extremely common here, can be pegged onto just about any imperative: pásale, ándale, camínale, bríncale, búscale, éntrale, so long as it is used intransitively. In other words, if we wanted someone to look for a book, we would never say “Búscale tu libro,” but “Búscale” all by itself (the book being understood implicitly), or simply “Busca tu libro.” Nevertheless, if we were looking for a book as a favor to someone (“Look for this book for him...”), then we could say “Búscale el libro.” But this is beside the point: in Mexico we tend to add “le” to a great deal of imperatives when there is no indirect object whatsoever.
Getting back to ¡Quiúbole!, this greeting is generally used when one stumbles upon someone he or she hasn’t seen for a while. It also tends to agglutinate with the other two we’ve already mentioned. If we were to write a script of one of these meetings, it might go like this:
—¡Quiúbole! ¿Cómo estás? ¿Qué pasó [o ¿qué ha pasado?] contigo? ¡Cuéntame!
—¡Quiúbole, tú! Bien... Nada... ¿Pos [non-standard variant of pues], qué iba a pasar?
The traditional dictionary greeting of ¡Hola! is much more formal than the others we’ve mentioned. When being intro¬duced to someone, whether it be in business or society, we might say “Hola, ¿cómo está?”, but never “¡Quiúbole!, ¿qué pasó?”, unless we were sixteen years old. That would be nice, but it is also highly improbable.
In Mexico, one answers the telephone with a question: ¿Bueno? This really throws a lot of people off because it makes no literal sense. It is neither hola, nor aló (the European or South American alternative), nor dígame. Why do we answer the telephone with a hearty ¿Bueno? I have no idea. But it is also the word most commonly used when testing microphones. Before any press conference, rock concert, book launching or whatever, you can always find someone testing the microphone and the sound system by saying — over and over again — bueno bueno bueno; bueno bueno; bueno bueno bueno. Then they’ll top it off by saying uno, dos; uno, dos, tres; bueno bueno bueno. Eloquent.
So it is possible that ¿bueno? as a way to answer the telephone arose as a test. When people were still unfamiliar with these artifacts of modernity, they probably picked up the receiver incredulously and said “¿Bueno?”, just to see if anybody was really there on the other side. And maybe it just caught on.
If you aren’t sure whether you should use ¡Quiúbole! or ¿Qué pasó?, don’t worry. You can always use the more traditional Buenos días, Buenas tardes, Buenas noches, Hola, ¿Cómo le va?, or ¿Cómo está? If these same people start greeting you with ¡Quiúbole!, then you’ve made it to the other side. Now you can start talking with them in familiar discourse: el tuteo. But remember that el tuteo (speaking in “tú,” or familiar discourse), like love itself, should always be mutual, and one should ask permission before addressing someone in tú: “¿Puedo tutearte?” (if you wish to jump the gun, taking a calculated risk that the answer will be “¡Sí, por supuesto!”), or “¿Puedo tutearlo?” if you aren’t so sure. Usually, however, if you actually pop the question, the answer will almost always be yes.
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