Sunday, January 11, 2009

Word of the day

My command of Spanish is so-so. My vocabulary is mediocre, and I'm still fuzzy on the subjunctive (among other things). Back in the day, I would spend some time rummaging through the Spanish section of a Spanish-English dictionary, looking for idioms and words that struck my fancy.

Nowadays, I have a vast corpus of text available to at least try to read, thanks to the web... and I had the pleasure of finding a wonderful word in an SL blog that, while largely fashion-oriented, has the occasional essay: I started the joke... by Eden Forwzy. In particular, it's from the article title "Bienvenidos al locodromo!"

(Are the inverted exclamation point and question mark on the way out? I hope not. Spanish would be the poorer for it. In English, just having the ending punctuation mark means that you can't indicate that only part of a sentence is exclaimed or interrogative, right? In Spanish, the equivalent sentence would end with ¿verdad?)

Now, if you were to insist that I translate, the best I could do would be "Welcome to the madhouse!" But look closer at locodromo. Etymologically you should recognize the Greek root that goes into "hippodrome", a racecourse (dromos) for horses (hippos). (OK, horses would be hippoi, wouldn't it?) How much more vivid the image of crazy people running around in circles!

So, thank you, Eden Forzwy. You've made my world a richer place.

1 comment:

edenforwzy said...

lol!! good morning princess, thanks for reading my madness, I was surprised to find my name here, an honor for me, and thank you to read! besos