Leonor from Dallas, Texas, says that when she was a child, her Spanish-speaking mother and grandmother used to her after a bump or scrape with Sana, sana, colita de rana, Si no sanas hoy, sanarás mañana , literally, “Heal, heal, little frog’s tail...
David from Black Mountain, North Carolina, is fond of the Spanish term that originally meant “someone who shares the same name as another person” (which is one of the meanings of “namesake” in English) and has expanded to mean “someone with whom you...
Chris in Ithaca, New York, contends that English needs a word that packs the same punch as the Spanish word vergüenza, usually translated as “shame,” but conveying more than that. Vergüenza derives from Latin verecundia, which specifies a kind of...
To encourage diners to dig into a delicious meal, an Italian might say mangia!, a French person bon appetit! and Spaniard would say buen provecho. But English doesn’t seem to have its own phrase that does the job in quite the same way. This is part...
In Spanish, mordida literally means “a bite,” but it’s a kind of bribe. It predates the English phrase “put the bite on someone” by more than a hundred years. One proposed etymology for the Spanish term is that divers rescuing treasure from wrecked...
The book Martha most recently gave as a gift is Breaking Out of Beginner’s Spanish by Joseph Keenan. She says it’ll help bump your Spanish up to the next level, even if you speak just a tiny bit. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
