In Chile people always talk about having to cambiar el chip, or change the chip in their brains to switch from one language to another. As though by making a slight key-turning motion by the side of their head, it is actually possible to activate, for example, the...

So I'm on Long Island.Fall here is like a plate of cut/up crisp green apples and peeled cucumbers and maybe celery with a small fan directing the smell into your nose, and into your brain. At the risk of waxing excessisve, it's like an unwarm shower on a hot day, the...

In what is perhaps one of the most memorable articles I ever read as an undergraduate and aspiring linguist, Berlin and Kay (1969) set up a system of categorizing languages by how many color terms there are. Here's a wikipedia description. But the main point here, as...

Chilean Spanish is rife with slang nearly unintelligible outside of its narrow confines. It's been called the most difficult Spanish, the slangiest Spanish. Even Chileans speak with pride of their children with beautiful diction and vocabulary because the nana...

Spanish has at its disposal an expression "vergüenza ajena" which indicates that you were embarrassed on behalf of another person. It has an element of pity, in that you feel sorry for the other person, and also of disdain, as if the person for whom you feel the...

I've talked before about how I love how Spanish does a great job of having consistent suffixes (yeah, suffices) to change one word into another. I believe I've talked about -azo, which means to hit something with the aforementioned item. A cabezazo is a header in...

When I was young(er) and (more) foolish I backpacked around Central America with a friend. This was right after college, and during not just one civil war in the region. I was woefully unprepared, not nearly conversant in Spanish, easily sunburned, heavily-laden and...

One of the most surprising things I've discovered since installing sitemeter on the page is exactly how many of you are searching for torta chilena. In this post I talk about things named for places that have nothing to do with the thing in common. Like french toast,...

One day, when I had just moved into my then-new-to-me apartment, I noticed that the kitchen sink was kind of sluggish. I thought perhaps the problem lay in a little tangle of happy wee leaves and sticks right below the drain, and so I judiciously used a screwdriver to...

While you in that big, slightly pig-shaped (at least when I draw it) country in the north are spending precious time and energy on a very long and drawn out campaigning process in which one candidate will triumph over the opponent’s ticket leading to great hilarity...