Corey in Buffalo, New York, says her family uses the word unta for “the piece of bread you use to sop up the last bite of what you’re eating.” They also use it as a verb, as in I’m going to unta. Her family is half Sephardic and half Ashkenazi, and her grandparents spoke Ladino. In Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, and Catalan, the verb untar means “to spread,” “to grease,” or “to smear,” and in Italian, a fettunta is “a greasy slice of bread,” also called a panunto. Corey says another family she knows refers to the end of a piece of bread as the schnuff. This term reflects their German heritage, because in German, the word Schnuff means “snout,” and is an etymological relative of English snuff and snuffle. In English, the end of a loaf of bread is also called the nose or the heel, or the butt or bum end, and in Spanish, it’s sometimes called the codo, or “elbow.” This is part of a complete episode.
Why do some Spanish speakers use adaptations of certain English terms when there’s already a perfectly good word for the same thing in Spanish? Sometimes the result is called “Spanglish.” For example, Spanish cuentas means “bills,”...
We’ve previously discussed when pigs fly and other idioms expressing profound skepticism that something will occur. That prompted an email from Guillermo in Tucson, Arizona, who shared a Spanish phrase that conveys a similar idea: cuando la...
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