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.