What’s the difference between cavalry and calvary? The first of these two refers to the group of soldiers on horseback and is a linguistic relative of such “horsey” words as caballero, the Spanish horse-riding gentleman, and cavalcade, originally a...
The idiom “two heads are better than one” doesn’t exist in quite the same form in Spanish, but there is a variation that translates to, “four eyes are better than two.” In Hungarian, there’s a phrase that’s...
The Spanish idiom, arrimar el ascua a su sardina, literally means “to bring an ember to one’s own sardine.” It means “to look out for number one,” the idea being that if a group is cooking sardines over a fire, and each...
Los Angeles, though founded by Spanish speakers, was very, very Anglo by the early 20th century. The “original” pronunciation of Los Angeles has been muddied for a long time. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
Martha Barnette gets a call from Martha Barnett, her Canadian tocaya who’s missing an “e” at the end of her last name. On the Global News website, you can see that the name Martha, perhaps now an anomaly in Canada, peaked in...
We need a common word for “the parents of your son-in-law or daughter-in-law.” Although English has the word affines, it’s rarely used outside of such fields as anthropology or psychiatry. Other languages have more commonly used...
