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I have a friend here that is great with words. He was the person whose FB status I saw that said “terremoto en Chile” and I knew it wasn’t a tremor but rather an actual earthquake. He’s also the person that hoofed it over to my house to see what was up and cleared me a path to be able to get back in, but I digress.

He has this expression that I love, “Ni un brillo” which means, it doesn’t shine at all, but which you take to mean, it’s not at all interesting to me. And I’ve heard him say it before, but the other day when he said it, I suddenly realized something.

Brillo pads, those steel wool chunks with the pink soap impregnated? That’s brillo. As in brillo (BREE-yo), which means shine. And now every time I hear someone say “ni un brillo,” I’ll think of some never-gonna-happen comedy routine wherein I take a brillo pad out of my pocket and say, “here’s one.”

Except that steel wool here is called virutilla, and it’s more of a mass moun than a countable one, mainly used to de-wax your waxed hardwood floors, and the countable version of this item is mago pads, and really, where’s the fun in that?

This post brought to you by a very short night of sleep and one of the many stacks of notes I take on things I wish to expound on at a later date. And they are many, fear not. Brillo pad, anyone?