Inspired by our conversation about the language of leave-taking and the Southern expression Y’all come go home with us, Claire in Durham, North Carolina, calls to reminisce about her experience as a teenager in Mexico and the extended good-byes among friends and family there. She has fond memories of them all singing “No Me Amenaces,” which translates as “Don’t Threaten Me.” Popularized by Jose Alfredo Jimenez, this mournful breakup song addresses a lover who threatens to leave and break the singer’s heart but never quite gets around to doing so. The song goes in part te vas y te vas y te vas y te vas y te vas y no te has ido which means “you are leaving, and you are leaving, and you are leaving, and you are leaving, and you are leaving, and you are leaving, and you are leaving, and you have not left.” This is part of a complete episode.
More from this show
A member of the ski patrol at Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort shares some workplace slang. Boilerplate denotes hard-packed snow with a ruffled pattern that makes skis chatter, death cookies are random chunks that could cause an accident, and...
A resident of Michigan’s scenic Beaver Island shares the term, boodling, which the locals use to denote the social activity of leisurely wandering the island, often with cold fermented beverages. There have been various proposed etymologies...