Borrowed words

Just to finish off last week’s article about film titles, I missed out a real classic which I was reminded of the other day. The film in question is “Some Like it Hot”, which I daresay most of you remember, and which has always been very popular in Spain. I think I’ll let you try and guess the title and put the answer at the end of this article, for those who have enough self control not to look!

We are still in the silly season, so I am not going to carry on with any serious grammatical stuff for a while. Instead, this week we’re going to look at words in the Spanish language that come originally from English. I think I can safely say they are hundreds, if not thousands of these, most of which pass by unnoticed by most people on a daily basis.

Here are a few of these anglicisms that are well incorporated into the language already, to the point where I imagine many Spanish people are unaware that they come from English. One of these is the meat “bisté”, which comes from the English “beef steak”. This is akin to “rosbif” which I will leave you to guess. It would seem that the British haven’t offered a lot more words of a culinary nature, but other very well established borrowed words are cheque ( the proper Spanish word is “talón”) clip ( meaning paperclip), cóctel, barman, sandwich and of course fútbol. Actually there is a perfectly respectable word for football in Spanish which is “balompié” but nobody ever uses it nowadays.

Many English words ending in “– ing” have long been incorporated into the Spanish language, although they almost always change their English meaning slightly. For example, “parking” for car park, “camping” for campsite, “piercing” which is the same in English, except that an English youth would say “I’m going to have my tongue pierced”, whereas the Spanish would say “Voy a hacerme un piercing en la lengua”. I know it doesn’t bear thinking about, but this is the world we live in. More and more these days we hear people talking about having “un buen feeling” with someone, which basically means they get on well together. Very trendy as well is to specialize in “marketing”, another concept not indigenously Spanish.

Now we come to a whole plethora of English words which have made an appearance in Spanish more recently, particularly in the media, both written and spoken. “Fan” is a very important one. There is an advert on the television at the moment which repeats the line “soy fan de …” ( I am a fan of …). Some English words just sound rather trendy or sophisticated, for example, “jetset” referring to a certain kind of lifestyle, a side effect of which is “jetlag”. “La lista de bestsellers” is obviously of interest to the reading public whilst “el boom” is something we’re not hearing so much about that at the moment. “Miss” and “Mister” have their own special uses: “Miss” as in “Miss World” which makes sense, but “Mister” is the name given to football managers, strangely. Vicente del Bosque is the best loved “Mister” around at the moment.

Finally, some married people might indulge in “un affaire” which is really a French word, whilst in ordinary Spanish this is “una aventura amorosa”, or more colloquially “un lío de faldas” ( an involvement with skirts). That translation sounds really old- fashioned and also reminds me that it is time to tell you the Spanish title of “Some Like it Hot”. It is “Con Faldas y a lo Loco” ( With Skirts and Going Crazy). Yes, well, the film industry has moved on slightly since then.