MORDIDA: SPANISH WORD OF THE YEAR

 

The word mordida has become a fashionable term, seemingly on everyone’s lips these days. Why? Because a large segment of Spain’s current government has been implicated in various forms of corruption: the soliciting of sobornos, bribes, under-the-table payments, kickbacks, payoffs, and the like. Mordida conveniently encompasses all such illicit “cuts,” and the term itself was imported from the Americas, chiefly from Mexico.

Although the word was not used during the forty-year dictatorship— for obvious reasons—the practice itself was almost certainly widespread. The fact that mordidas are now the talk of the town does not mean they were absent in earlier Spain; quite the opposite. As in many parts of the Americas, mordidas were part of the everyday political diet. As El Siglo (Panama, 04/10/2000) quoted La revista Alternativa: “el chanchullo y la mordida han pasado a ser expresiones normales del lenguaje cotidiano.”

In English, payoff and kickback are strong and serviceable equivalents of mordida.