Guiñar is the verb to wink. The noun wink is guiño or guiñada.

To learn about something, or to find out about an event is to enterarse de said event. In English we often say that we heard about something when we might have actually read it. The word enterarse is to learn that information in some way; either through a verbal story, news broadcast or reading it in the paper.

Enterarse is reflexive.

Pumelo is the word for grapefruit that I have heard in Argentina. In Mexico we used the word toronja. According to Wikipedia a pomelo is a particular type of grapefruit from Southeast Asia. However, pumelo is used to mean any type of grapefruit here. The word pumelo can refer to the fruit or the tree.

A new friend of mine asked me how old I was (he is 86). When I told him that I was 40 he replied with “¡Eres un pibe todavía!” Or, “You are still just a kid.”

Pibe seems to be quite Argentine in its use according to a forum thread. It can mean a child or young person. It seems to have a friendly connotation like we might use the word lad or lass in English.

In Mexico we used the word chango to mean a monkey. I think that the use of chango in this way is a Mexican thing. They also use the word mono, which is what the rest of the world uses for monkey.

I was quite surprised when we first moved to Argentina to see a cage by one of the doors that said “Guarda Changos.” I could not imagine that the Argentines would carry their pet monkeys to the store and put them in the cages while they were shopping. Another equally ridiculous thought was that it was a place to stick your kids while shopping. (In the US we sometimes call our children “little monkeys“).

The image of the “monkey cages” at the grocery store has stuck with me. And though we have been in Argentina over 2 months, I found out last week what a chango is to an Argentine.

A chango is a shopping cart. Apparently the “guarda changos” cage is to lock your shopping cart in while you pull your car up closer to the front door so you can load in your groceries.

I have heard bronca used to mean various things from a slight annoyance to a knock-down-drag-out fight. I would guess that it depends on context if the meaning is a small argument between friends or a scolding that ends up in a quarrel.

A couple of weeks ago I heard someone talking about chistes verdes. I did not know what that expression meant, but I gathered from the way it was said it meant off-color jokes, or dirty jokes.

What little research I did on this phrase (I have to admit I really did not want to find out too much information) it seems to be a universal idiomatic expression. Are there other words that express the same thing? Does every Spanish speaking country use this expression?

We are having a shortage of certain food products in Argentina right now. The price of sugar has gone up considerably and stores are limiting how many bags of sugar (and now other products) a person can buy. This is called an escasez. The paper today says because of a shortage, escasez, there will soon be limits on dairy products too.

Canoso is grey-haired or white-haired. It is an adjective that describes a person, therefore it can be masculine or femenine; i.e., canoso or canosa.

Today in Argentina all the gas stations shut down and would not sell gas for 4 hours. This was a nationwide ban on the sale of gas in the country. According to the newspaper the gremio of the gas producers is who put the ban on the sale of gas. Gremio is a union. Gremio can also be translated as guild.