8 Spanish Words We Should Be Using in English

The following eight Spanish words have been carefully selected from two years on
the Iberian peninsula spent studying the language and befriending its people.
By Ed M. Wood

When I left university I felt like I was bursting through a set of saloon swing doors,
arms loaded with qualifications about to hold up the professional world until they
handed over the job of my dreams. I think many graduates feel like this, and this
misplaced confidence compounds the disappointment when the professional world
shrugs its collective shoulders.
My reaction to this disappointment was to turn my back on the opportunity vacuum and
stock up on soft skills. I googled for TEFL courses in Spain, found a charming townlet
called Zamora in Castilla y Leon and booked myself a one-way ticket. My Spanish
education, albeit informal, started almost as soon as we touched down. I was tasked
with navigating my way across Madrid weighed down by my backpack and an
oppressive, immovable mid-summer mugginess.

Your relationship with new words is shaped to some extent by the context in which you
learn them. Whenever I hear words like estacin de trenes (train station), va (track) and
billete (ticket), images of hulking, dusty mazes of misinformation arise in bubbles of
residual dread. I consider this part one of my Spanish education, which I would revisit
every time I tangled with foreign bureaucracy or indulged in awkward small talk, often
ending up feeling inadequate and unpractised. Part two was the polar opposite:
education through warm discussion with heated housemates; bar room jibes and living
room jest; and the daily, routine exchanges with familiar faces in familiar places.
The following is a list of my favorite words from two years of part two. I sincerely hope
you enjoy it, and look forward to your input as to your favorite foreign words.

1. Leche (noun) - Milk

You cant do much with milk in English. If you spill it, you can cry over it, but thats
about it. One of the first things which struck me on my arrival on the Iberian peninsula
was the apparent fascination with milk. Excitement, disbelief, good fortune, bad fortune,
admiration could seemingly all be expressed with the help of milk. Dont believe me?
Consider the following, entirely fabricated exchange:

El jugador de ftbol corra a toda leche cuando uno de sus oponentes le dio una leche
en la pierna.

The soccer player was running at full speed when one of his opponents hit him
on his leg.

Ay la leche, grit el jugador al caerse al suelo.

Damn it, cried the player as he fell to the floor.

Un espectador en el estadio coment a su amigo, Qu mala leche! Ese futbolista es la

leche, y si est herido no va a poder jugar en la final, Me cago en la leche!

A spectator in the stadium turned to his friend, That was out of order! Hes
the best, and if hes injured hes not going to be able to play in the final. Bloody
hell!

Su amigo le respondi, no te pongas de mala leche, tio. No me parece tan serio. Se

levantar y seguir jugando. Lo vers.

His friend responded, dont get into a bad mood, man. It doesnt look that
serious. Hell get up and continue playing. Youll see.

Y una leche, dij el espectador abatido.

No way, said the spectator, dejected.

So you see, if you memorise the above expressions, you can really milk that leche.

2. Polvo (noun) - Dust

Dust is a surprisingly versatile word in English: a footballer may receive a

particularly hard tackle and kiss the dust, only to receive an apology from the opposing
player once the game is over and the dust has settled. As you grow up, your favorite
teddy bear may be left in a corner to gather dust, only to be dusted off once the next
generation of bear huggers comes along. Just like in English, you can bite the dust, or
morder el polvo, in Spanish, although I wouldnt recommend it.
Si ests hecho polvo - if youre made (into) dust - then youre ground down, exhausted,
knackered, whacked, and si ests hecho polvo de la cabeza then youre stir crazy, nuts
or out to lunch. And si haces polvo a alguien, then you make someone (into) dust,
meaning you wipe the floor with someone in a competition. So you get the picture: if
youre polvo, then youve been pulverised.
But Spanish also uses some idioms that bear a more tenuous connection to the tiny
particles that we call dust. For reasons that remain unbeknown to me, polvo also refers
to the sexual act. So if youre prudish (or mojigato; another one of my favorite words
which didnt make it into this list), then avert your gaze now Look up the phrase
echar un polvo and youll see the definition realizar el acto sexual, whilst if you say
someone has a polvo - alguien tiene un polvo - it means you find them sexually
attractive. There we have it; many shades of grey to this dust.

3. Resaca (noun) - Hangover

Resaca is one of those words that many English speakers will already know, like tapas,
burrito, cargo, guerrilla, chorizo, and armada, without knowing the original or
alternative meanings. Did you know that burrito means little donkey; guerilla means
little war (making the popular collocation guerilla warfare kind of redundant,
although guerilla fare sounds like a poorly spelled circus act); and un chorizo can also
mean un ladrn (a thief), making it theoretically possible for a chorizo to run away with
your chorizo. Going back to the resaca, though, as I have a terrible tendency to do:
tener resaca means to have a hangover in everyday parlance, but la resaca also refers
to the undertow or undercurrent which leaves debris and driftwood scattered across a
shore following a storm, and it is this playful imagery that endears me to the word.

4. Botelln (noun) - Public drinking

Botelln is the augmentative form of botella (bottle), so el botelln would literally

translate as the big bottle. As any visiting Erasmus student will recall (although this
may depend upon just how big the bottle was), un botelln is much more than a
supersized coke container. Descend upon a public square and youll be met by hundreds
of buoyant youths riding towards a sugar high on a wave of calimocho, a surprisingly
potent mix of wine and coke which betrays all the stereotypes of Spain as a nation of
fine-wine-worshippers. Botelln-ing has become such a feature of Spanish youth culture
that further terms have been spawned, including botelldromo - an official space for the
execution of botellones - and macro-botelln which, as you may have guessed, is even
bigger than a big bottle, although it remains unclear at what point a botelln becomes a
macro-botelln.

5. Vergenza (noun) - Embarrassment/Shame

Vergenza falls somewhere between shame and embarrassment depending upon the
sentence into which it falls. Qu vergenza! would translate as how embarrassing!,
while if I were to say to you Qu poca vergenza tienes! I would be castigating you for
having no shame. But my choice of vergenza comes not from its breadth of use but
rather its involvement in two delightful terms: la de la vergenza and vergenza ajena.
La de la vergenza translates as the one of the shame, and refers to the final piece of
food left on a shared plate that no one dares to pluck for fear of being banned from all
future tapas-oriented activities. Vergenza ajena is the Spanish equivalent of that
popular untranslatable German word Fremdscham; the feeling of embarrassment or
shame that one feels on behalf of the perpetrator of the shameful or embarrassing act.

6. Friolero/Caluroso (adj) - Sensitive to cold/heat

The average Brit has an ingrained need to comment on the weather or enquire thereafter
at any given opportunity. This is not at all unusual when you take into account how
imminently changeable and whimsical weather is in the British Isles. Whats more
surprising is that its the Spanish, with their hazy days and sun-filled plights, who have
two common words which the English could really do with: friolero and caluroso. The
adjectives are used to describe someone who is particularly sensitive to cold (friolero)
or heat (caluroso). So next time someone complains of the cold in clement times, tell
them to stop being so friolero.

7. Desvelado (adj) - Unable to sleep because you are

kept awake by something or someone

Estuve toda la noche desvelado, murmured my compaero de piso, or flatmate. He

had just appeared from his bedroom, grumpy and confused, and so most probably
unsympathetic to my need to know what on earth desvelado meant. It is in these
situations that your mind races for connotations, associations, roots, derivatives,
generalisable meanings of prefixes; anything that affords a stable enough foundation on
which to estimate a response.
Des- is a negative prefix, so likely referred to the absence of something, so now I just
needed to work out -velado. I knew una vela was one of those homonyms which
baffle language learners, carrying multiple meanings including a sail, a candle, and
a vigil. If ests a dos velas, then youre broke, penniless, with no money for
electricity and just two candles; whilst si pasas la noche en vela, then youre on vigil all
night, or awake. Thats it!, I thought. The opposite of en vela - to abandon the state of
vigilance - hes slept so heavily that hes now struggling to return to the world of the
living. Pues me alegro por ti, David, que bajo este calor no me puedo ni dormir; I
was happy for him, as I could never fall asleep in the sweltering Spanish summer.
He looked at me, yet more confused; Desvelado, to; despierto, alerta, incapaz de
dormir Desvelado, it turned out, was another one of those words that is conspicuous

by its absence in English; to be unable to sleep because something is keeping you

awake, be it noisy neighbors or your latest preoccupation.

8. Agujetas (noun) - Muscle stiffness

My final word on my list of favorite German words was Ahnungslosigkeit, which made
it onto said list due to its euphony. Similarly, the word agujetas is a wonderfully guttural
adventure which rockets and plummets between consonants and vowels whilst
exercising some of the sounds that anglophones must master to mimic a Spanish accent
successfully. Its phonetic merits are not the only thing which endear one to the word,
however. Agujetas refer to the muscle ache, soreness or stiffness that one experiences in
the days following unusual physical exertion.
The words approximation of the diminutive form of the Spanish word for needles
(agujas dim. agujitas) immediately inculcates the image of thousands of tiny needles
pricking a tired, cantankerous muscle group, although the true root of the word agujetas
is not believed to lie here. One intriguing theory proposes the following sequence of
semantic leaps; agujetas was used as a term for objects of little value. This then became
a colloquial, dysphemistic label for the meagre tips given to postmen on horseback in

the 18th century, which in turn became synonymous with the aches an inexperienced
rider endures after riding a horse.
Words are just wonderful, arent they?
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