I thought tintorería was a window tinting shop for a long time. Even though there is a lot of sun here I could not figure out why they needed so many tint shops. Then I found out tintorería is a dry-cleaner’s shop.

I have seen the word abarrotes on many stores. These are typically smaller stores that sell just basic food items. Mostly small neighborhood stores. I thought it meant something like “quick in and out store” but my friend told me the other day she always thought it meant groceries.

I looked up the word and saw that it indeed does mean groceries, but it also has a verb form, abarrotar, which means to pack or to fill up.

I can’t figure out how the two meanings are connected if they are. Anyone know?

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 medical term for sleepiness. Normally we hear people say “tengo sueño” to mean “I am sleepy.”

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 divide up.

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 the word you would use for a patch in clothing. But for many of the idiomatic uses of the word patch, there are other words that are used. One example is to patch something up would be hacerle un arreglo a. Though it sounds like a slang term, to put a patch on something is parchar.