If you watch children’s programs here long enough you will hear a reference to PrÃncipe Azul. Translated literally it means blue prince. But its significance is Prince Charming, just like in the fairy tales, or the ideal man.
I’m not completely sure why blue is used but some things I have read say it could refer to the phrase blue blood meaning aristocracy. This seems a reasonable connection to me.
Does anyone else have any suggestions about the origins?
With today being Thanksgiving, el DÃa de Acción de Gracias, I thought I would give you another way to say thank you. Agradecer is a bit trickier in that it is a verb and not a noun like gracias.
If you try to apply the word appreciate to agradesco, it will really help you understand how to use it since appreciate is a verb as well. Often we will first think of grateful or thankful to go with agradecer, but those are adjectives and therefore cause problems when trying to figure out the usage grammatically.
Te agradesco tu amor – I appreciate your love. I could say that I am thankful or grateful for your love, but then that requires the being verb ‘to be.’ Stick with appreciate and you will thank me when you try to learn to use agradecer.
Colegio does not mean college necessarily. It can be if applied to a group of people, but typically it is used to mean school, and usually school up to the American English understanding of college. An American English college would be universidad in Spanish.
However, there are times when colegio can be applied to mean college when you are talking about a group, or body, of people. For example: electoral college. Or it can be a professional association such as a college of surgeons. In these cases the Spanish colegio and the English college are interchangeable.
Escuela, however, can be applied to any type of educational institution. It is most commonly used to refer to schools that are pre-college level, but can be used for a college as well. In any way we use school in English, escuela can be used in Spanish.
These are words that will be in greater or lesser use depending on which country you are in. I remember in Peru we used colegio almost exclusively and escuela was almost never used. Here in Mexico we use escuela. While colegio is certainly understood, it is not the preferred word to use when talking about your school.
The usage and description of the word college in English varies greatly as well. It depends on the country you are in. A quick look at the Wikipedia article for college will tell you that even though many countries speak English, we don’t always mean the same thing by the words we use.
I have always heard the word pelón applied to someone’s baldness. Often it is used as a term of endearment. You can used it to refer to your bald friend.
This weekend I was helping to track down a wiring problem in a building. This was a new building and the wiring had just been run, but it was not working properly. When one of the breakers was switched on, it would bog down the generator to a point of killing it. Obviously there was a short somewhere.
Finally the electrician who did the original wiring was able to trace it down to un cable pelón. I was surprised by this use of the word as applied to a wire. I discovered that pelón can be used to indicate something is bare.
I love to sew. When I go shopping for fabric I am not looking for fábrica.
Fábrica is a factory or a place where things are manufactured.
What I need in the fabric store is tela.
There is a commercial on here that I have seen quite frequently and it uses the phrase lo que me late. I couldn’t figure out what it was talking about in context so I used my handy translator. It informed me lo que me late means what barks at me. Now I was really confused because that just did not fit with what I saw on the commercial.
So I asked someone and now I know, lo que me late means what I think about or how I feel about something.
Now I feel so smart I understand what they are saying on a commercial.
Quehacer is two simple words, que and hacer, joined together to make a new word.
Que and hacer of course are that and to do.
Quehacer is occupation, business or tarea.
