For Thanksgiving my Spanish relatives bring a variety of Spanish canapés and a real Spanish tortilla. It has to cooked just right, which means cooked with the egg just north of runny, and preferably with onion. A Spanish idiom using tortilla is “olerse la tortilla”, which literally translates to “to smell the tortilla”. The idiomatic meaning is “to see it coming”.
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30Nov
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28Nov
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“Hacer un buñuelo” literally translates to “to make a doughnut”. Have any idea what the idiomatic meaning is? It’s “to make a mess of things” or “to botch something up”. For example, to describe a movie that’s a bomb, one would say “esa película es un buñuelo”.
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25Nov
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“Eso me da mala espina” literally translates to “that gives me bad thorn”. The idiomatic translation is “I don’t like the look of that”.
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24Nov
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“Jota” is the letter “J”. The figurative meaning is “iota” or a small “bit”. Thus, “no entender ni jota” means “not to understand a word” and “no decir ni jota” signifies “not to say a word”.
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23Nov
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When you’re trying to communicate to someone that he may have to wait for something a LONG time, you might say “don’t hold your breath”. An equivalent Spanish phrase is “espéreme sentado”, which means “wait for me sitting down”.
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19Nov
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“Tener buen diente” literally means “to have good tooth”. The idiomatic meaning is “to be a hearty eater”. Compare to “to have a sweet tooth”.
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18Nov
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A crafty person might be described as “as sly as a fox”. The equivalent phrase in Spanish is “más avispado que un lagarto”, which means “craftier than a lizard”. Another version is “más listo (astuto) que un zorro”, which means “craftier than a fox”.
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17Nov
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Here’s a Spanish saying that has a similar equivalent in English: “el cántaro que mucho va al fuente acaba por romperse”. The translation is “the pitcher that goes often to the fountain ends up getting broken”. This reminds one of the phrase “going to the well too often”, although the English version refers to exhausting the source rather than breaking the vessel.
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16Nov
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Andalucía is the Southern region of Spain which includes such famous cities as Sevilla, Cordóba, Granada and Málaga. A person from Andalucía is an “andaluz”. “decir andaluzadas” would literally translates to “to tell andalusianisms”. The idiomatic meaning is “to tell tall stories”.
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14Nov
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When we attack someone or something with great fury we do it “tooth and nail”. The equivalent phrase in Spanish reverses the order and uses the plural form, as in “con uñas y dientes”.