“Castillos en el aire” literally translates as “Castles in the air”. Two equivalents in English are: “Pie in the sky” and “pipe dream”.
-
31Aug
Categories: Uncategorized Comments: 0
-
28Aug
Categories: Uncategorized Comments: 0
“Caerle a uno como un balde de agua fria” literally translates to “To fall on someone like a pail of cold water”. The equivalent colloquial phrase in English is “To hit someone like a ton of bricks”.
-
27Aug
Categories: Food Comments: 0
“Armar una ensalada” literally translates to “To stir up a salad”. The colloquial meaning is “to make a mess”.
-
21Aug
Categories: Animals Comments: 0
“En menos que canta un gallo” literally translates to “In less than a cock sings (crows)”. In English we would say “In a flash”. The British might say “Before you can say Jack Robinson”. My favorite equivalent colloquialism is “In a New York minute”.
-
10Aug
Categories: Uncategorized Comments: 0
Many Spanish idioms have an identical counterpart in English. Here are two:
“Estar en el septimo cielo” means “To be in seventh heaven”
“Mover cielo y tierra” translates to “To move heaven and earth”
-
09Aug
Categories: Anatomy Comments: 0
“Tuetano”, which means “marrow” is used to provide emphasis, as in “Calado hasta los tuetanos” which literally means “To be soaked to the marrow”. In English we use the marrow casing for our version: “To be soaked to the bone”. “Hasta los tuetanos” means “through and through”, so if you are “madly in love” or “heads over heels in love” you can say “enamorado hasta los tuetanos”.
-
08Aug
Categories: Animals Comments: 0
“Un humor de perros” literally means “A mood of dogs”. The colloquial translation is “A lousy mood”. Another animal related idiom is “No es moco de pavo” , the literal translation of which doesn’t sound too attractive in English: “It is not turkey snot”. The idiomatic meaning is “It’s no trifle” or “It’s no small matter”.
-
07Aug
Categories: Animals Comments: 0
“Con esos bueyes hay que arar” literally translates to “With those oxen you must plow”. The idiomatic meaning is not hard to guess: “One must make do with what one has”. Here’s another animal based saying: “Como quitarle un pelo a un gato” means “Like pulling one hair off of a cat”. In English we’d say “Like a drop in the bucket”.
-
06Aug
Categories: Royalty/Aristocracy Comments: 1
Here’s a euphemism for “going to the bathroom”: “Ir a donde el rey va solo”, which literally means “To go where the king goes alone”. In English the ladies say “To go powder one’s nose”. Men often say “I have to go see a man about a horse”.
“Se lo ponen como a Felipe II” literally means “They serve it to him as they would to Phillip the Second”. The equivalent in English would be “He gets everything handed to him on a plate”.
-
03Aug
Categories: Nationality/Ethnicity Comments: 0
In the always dangerous category of nationalities, here are two colloquial terms.
“Cabeza de turco” literally means “Turk’s head”. Idiomatically it means “scapegoat” or “fall guy”.
“Llave inglesa’” or “English key” means “monkey wrench”.