Desechables are disposables. Items you would use once then discard, such as paper or plastic plates, cups and bowls or syringes or diapers.

Butaca is an arm chair, or a seat. It can mean theater seating.
At our local baseball stadium the seating is divided in four sections. Two of them are called butaca and butaca alta. Butaca would be the field level seating and the butaca alta is the upper deck.

Manejar is to manage. I don’t know why I had not seen this before, but this evening I made the connection that the two words manejar and manage have the same root. Literally the word means to handle. We use it to mean to contol both in Spanish and in English.

Another, apparently, uniquely Mexican word. Salpicadera is a fender. This can be a fender for a car or a fender for a bicycle/motorcycle. Guardafangos is also used for mudflaps or fenders in Mexico.
Argentina uses the word guardabarros.

The local police were handing out road safety tips the other day. I don’t remember all the wording, but it mentioned something about somnolencia. I knew, of course, that insomnia (in English) is the inability to sleep, so I figured that somnolencia was drowsiness, or sleepiness. From my study it seems that somnolencia is the […]

A subdivision of houses is called a fraccionamiento in Mexico. This is used when a section of town is a “planned” section. Usually houses that are similar or identical in design and probably built by the same company–a housing development. In Argentina they call this a loteo.
The word fraccionaminento comes from fraccionar which means to […]

Today we went to the playa, the beach, where there was arena. On the beach we wore our playeras, short sleeve shirts or t-shirts.

I had to go to the bicycle store today to get a patch for my tire. I asked the guy for a parche, unsure of the word. He looked at me as if to say “what else would you call it.” I just was not sure if parche was a patch. It is.
That is also […]

Tonight at church the preacher read a verse that contained the word engendrar. I knew it meant to give birth to, to father, or to breed, but I suspected that it had a deeper meaning. It seems to mean the impetus or the starting point of something. Without talking about human or animal reproduction it […]

I first learned that chalk was tiza when I was in Peru. Here in Mexico we use the word gis to mean chalk. Both of these refer to the stick of chalk you write with. If you are talking about the substance that gis or tiza is made from, it is called creta or caliza.
Apparently […]