LAS LENGUAS INGLESA Y ESPAÑOLA de Delfín Carbonell

  “To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub,” Hamlet tells us, with his usual gift for turning a simple human activity into a metaphysical problem. Sleep, it seems, is never just sleep. How many hours should we sleep? Six? Seven? Eight? Nobody quite agrees. What does seem clear is that people like sleeping a lot—or at least, they like talking about it. Both Spanish and English offer a generous range of expressions to describe sleeping more than what is considered normal, whatever normal may be. Spanish, for instance, is particularly imaginative. One can dormir a pierna suelta , or sleep como un lirón, una marmota, un santo, un bendito, un leño, un tronco, un ceporro , or simply profundamente . The sleeper is likened, variously, to animals, holy figures, and large, immobile objects—none of them especially alert. English is no less resourceful. One may sleep like a log , sleep soundly , or sleep like a baby, a top, a rock, a princess, the dead, or a stone . Here, too, ...

  HORROR Gustar horrores (un horror)  Like an awful lot Marta me gusta horrores I like Martha an awful lot — “La salsa, sin embargo, me gusta horrores.” Antonio Vergara, Comer en el país valencià , 1981. Esp. Tener horror a Dread, fear, have a horror of Le tengo horror al trabajo I dread work — “… sobre todas las cosas, el diablo tiene horror a la sal.” Alberto Cousté, Biografía del Diablo , 1978. Arg. Un horror A sight Margarita es un horror Margaret is a sight — “¡Este niño es un horror, señora!" El Mundo, 20/08/1994. Esp.

   Many websites offer language help under the heading “Word of the Day.” They mean well, but they peddle arcane vocabulary that has little to do with our contemporary needs. I say this despite being a pedant and a lover of precise words. Years ago, in college, I bought a little booklet entitled Ten Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary , which was filled with obscure, archaic terms nobody would ever understand in daily discourse. I see that this practice continues, to my regret, because I endorse building vocabulary in context, not in lists. I always try to expand my vocabulary when reading, especially literature produced by good writers.      Expand your vocabulary by reading and looking up words you encounter, and not by relying on lists like this: Fortuitous Vilipend Nefarious Rancor Mellifluous Verdigris Slopulation                   

It has been raining in Spain for over a month. Entire villages have been evacuated, roads and bridges have collapsed, and dams are overflowing. The idiom "llover sobre mojado" has returned to its original meaning of raining upon rain. The soil cannot absorb any more water, and it is spitting it back up. A disaster. "Llover sobre mojado has been translated as "when it rains, it pours." This is a partially acceptable translation when it means that it rains pitchforks, cats, and dogs, and even buckets, but it does not explain the figurative meaning of one unpleasant event happening again and again, over and over. "Lo que ocurre es que llueve sobre mojado: es la enésima vez que Laborda tiene que soportar que..." (La Razón, 02/09/2002). Laborda has had to put up with... whatever, again and again, and thus "llueve sobre mojado". This idiomatic expression is on everybody's lips these days in Iberia, to prove that "the rain in Spain falls m...

  My Random House Webster's Dictionary defined simile as "a figure of speech in which two unlike things are explicitly compared, as in she is like a rose.” I remember (those were the days!) reading in 2003, the Bonita Daily News , Florida, on July 11, this comparison or simile with ugly: “That new pharmacy is an assault to my eyes; it is everything the LPA is supposed to stop! It is a big box, ugly as sin itself, a monstrosity.” This led me to delve deeply and find more "ugly" possibilities in current English:  Ugly as sin (a toad,  butt ugly, fuck, the devil, shit, death, a face that would stop a clock, as cat shit, piss-ugly, pug ugly, hell, as it gets, as can be ).       I did not stop here, remember this is a bilingual Blog. How does "feo" fare in Spanish? And I found the following:  Más feo que un pecado (Picio, Carracuca, un dolor, el hambre, el bu, Quasimodo,  que pegarle a un padre [con un calcetín sudado], feo del culo, feo con...

  I have just discovered I suffer from Bag Lady Syndrome , and—upon reflection—that I have been suffering from it since childhood. It is a deep-seated anxiety, not a clinical diagnosis but a recognized psychological fear of running out of money. I am not an impulse buyer; on the contrary, I feel guilty after every purchase, including the necessary ones. I have never actually been short of money, yet I have spent a lifetime bracing myself for the possibility of becoming down-and-out—or worse, a penniless derelict, a panhandler with excellent grammar. I am not a miser. I simply suffer. And so I think a great deal about money. Unsurprisingly, I also collect the words for it. In Spanish, my collection so far includes: ahorrillos, alpiste, astillar, en B, banca, billetaje, billete, blanquear, blanqueo, caja B, candongas, cartón, pasar el cazo, céntimo, chavo, clavo, de clavo, colorado, crudo, cuartos, dineral, dinero extra, dinero negro, dos duros, extra, fajo, gañota, gastar un c...