LAS LENGUAS INGLESA Y ESPAÑOLA de Delfín Carbonell

  “Respecto al comunismo puro autoritario fui hostil a él por temperamento y por ideas. Pensar que un hombre o un grupo de hombres pueden saber lo que le conviene al mundo entero me parece una prueba de petulancia y de osadía verdaderamente repulsiva.” Pío Baroja, “La formación psicológica de un escritor.” Cruz y Raya, 12/5/1935.

 Del Acertijero antológico español , de Garter y Fernández, entresaco estas definiciones jocosas que, bien mirado, tienen mucha enjundia: Pezón : un pez grandullón. Orejas : asas de la cabeza. Moroso : señor que defiende a los moros. León : persona que no para de leer. Monólogo : mono que habla solo. Cartón : carta enorme. Cartera : mujer del cartero. Universo : poema muy breve. Limón : lima muy grande.

 Compiling a comprehensive bilingual dictionary is never a simple undertaking, but when the focus is on phraseology, the task becomes particularly demanding. Phraseology includes idioms, collocations, locutions, proverbs, sayings, set phrases, clichés, similes, exclamations, puns, and countless other fixed or semi-fixed expressions that give a language its distinctive character. In many respects, phraseology constitutes what might be called la entraña viva, la esencia comunicadora de una lengua ,   the living core, the communicative essence of a language. Native speakers do not communicate by stringing together isolated dictionary words alone; they rely on habitual combinations, inherited turns of phrase, and culturally shared expressions that carry shades of meaning impossible to capture through literal translation. For that reason, a bilingual phraseological dictionary cannot limit itself to offering simple lexical equivalents. Such a work must go further. It should provid...

Human beings seem naturally inclined to dodge responsibility and skirt the blame. When things go wrong, there is always something in the way: circumstances, family obligations, bad luck, society, health, destiny — you name it. Rarely are we simply at fault. Languages, of course, reflect this very human tendency. Both English and Spanish abound in idioms suggesting burdens, impediments, or invisible chains that prevent us from acting freely or successfully. We are not responsible, the expressions imply; we are weighed down by forces beyond our control. Take the English idiom an albatross around one’s neck , made famous by Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner . The albatross symbolizes a heavy psychological or moral burden from which one cannot easily escape. Spanish offers several close equivalents: llevar una cruz a cuestas , llevar una pesada carga , or even tener la soga al cuello . “I wasn’t ready to wear my failure like an albatross around my neck.” -Haggai Carmon , The ...

  The President of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, during her visit to Aguascalientes, Mexico, was boycotted, insulted, and subjected to a climate of political hostility that eventually led her to shorten her stay. Much of this atmosphere appears to have been encouraged by sectors close to President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, whose brand of combative left-wing populism often shows little tolerance for dissenting voices. This episode brings to mind Professor Edward O. Wilson, the distinguished Harvard naturalist, who, in February 1978, while delivering a lecture at a meeting of the AAAS, was heckled by activists and had a jug of water poured over his head as members of the audience shouted, ‘You are all wet, you are all wet.’ Wilson was accused of being a Nazi and a fascist, accusations that were as absurd as they were unjust. History has a tendency to repeat itself. Those who speak in favor of liberty and democratic pluralism are frequently caricatured and demonized by ...

I  am very skeptical about phraseological etymologies, since most of them must be taken with a grain of salt. Llevar (traer) por la calle de la amargura , meaning to give someone a hard time or make someone’s life miserable, is a case in point. In his novel Los vencejos (2021), Fernando Aramburu uses it thus: “... dos hijas que le traían por la calle de la amargura.” The two daughters were making his life miserable. But what is the unofficial origin? Near the Plaza Mayor, in Madrid , there was allegedly a street, calle de la amargura , through which soldiers or criminals—depending on the source—were led to execution. The idiomatic expression appeared in the DRAE in 1970. Yet Gregorio González mentions the phrase, in reference to Christ, in El guitón Onofre (1604), which gives the folk etymology the lie and shows how slow the Academia has been to register phraseology. Be that as it may, my conclusion is that folk etymologies, however colorful, should generally be mistrusted.