Cagatintas

Botellón

In a country where fried breadcrumbs and garlic has national cuisine status, it's not surprising to find that a large congregation of youths drinking copious amounts of booze, pissing copious amounts of piss over pavements, town plazas and private doorsteps (or botellón) has been elevated to national pastime status. But don’t get me wrong. I’m not being condescending about Spanish culinary skills, or indeed sanctimonious about their binge drinking kids – how could I? I’m British. On the contrary, I’m inspired by their ability to celebrate without irony or arrest things that would be rendered unpalatable if they were made anywhere else in the world or done by anyone else. I think this is something essential to the Spanish identity. Granted, not every Spaniard loves a botellón but at least the ones that do can keep the misdemeanors down to making noise, dropping litter and losing urine instead of blood. Even the word seems to have a bit of fun attached to it. Formed by the addition of -ón to the root word botella, the resultant augmented noun means literally ‘big bottle’. Other augmentative suffixes like -ona, -azo, -aza, -ote and -ota are equally useful tacked on to words like gol (golazo - cracking goal), cuerpo (cuerpazo - fit bod) and libro (librote - War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy) if your vocab is too weak for you to rattle off a proper appraisal. And before I break your head with any more shitty classroom grammar, it’s worth remembering another word more intimately related to botellón that undergoes a similar transformation: resacón. The root word resaca meaning hangover.

Anda

Kicking off expressions of surprise and disbelief all over Spain ever since the natives realised their normally versatile tongue was no match for a ‘W’ (ask a Spaniard to say “windscreen wiper” and you’ll see what I mean), this multi-purpose superlative is used to plug the linguistic hole created by the absence of Anglo Saxon staples such as “Wow!”, “Whoah!” and “What the fuck?” A Spanish child can often be heard screaming it on finding a snail, a full pack of cigarettes or something equally entertaining on the floor of your local bar. Equally, a Spanish friend might use it as a jocular greeting if he or she is (a) surprised by the amount of weight you have put on since the last time you met or (b) how attractive your new partner is. On both of these last two occasions no offence should be taken. That is unless you hear our featured word preceding the rapid-fire construction “y que te den por culo!” In which case you might want to take offence and assume your friendship has not blossomed during your time apart. That, or your partner has just started foaming at the mouth.