I think this word may be uniquely Mexican. Metiche is used for someone who is nosy or a busy body. Someone who cannot keep their nose out of other people’s business is a metiche.
When I lived in Perú some years back, I remember we used the word sapo for this purpose. The idea is that a toad has big eyes and is always looking in on other people’s matters. However, I learned this while working at a church and school for the Deaf. It makes sense that the Deaf would use a word that focuses on big eyes to mean nosy. I have often wondered if that was an idiomatic usage confined to the Deaf in Perú, or if the hearing population used that term too. Any ideas?
This is a word that I would think changes from country to country, and maybe even within regions of the same country.
Talking with a friend last night he used the word aguacero to refer to a rain storm. It was the first time I remember hearing it. It means a sudden downpour of rain. Or it can mean a flash flood.
OÃr and escuchar deal with the sense of hearing. And just like ver and mirar they are different aspects of the same thing.
OÃr, according to my dictionary, is to perceive sounds with your ear, to hear.
Escuchar is to apply your ear to hear, to listen.
My dictionary also cautions not to confuse oÃr with escuchar and not to use escuchar for oÃr.
If you just hear the noise, it’s oÃr, but if you listen to what the noise is saying, it’s escuchar.
I never knew there was a question about the spelling of the ninth month until this weekend. I saw it spelled “setiembre.” The Real Academia de España accepts this spelling as well as the more common “septiembre” spelling.
The spelling without the p is apparently used in some parts of Latin America as well as regions in Spain.
As with days of the week, month names are not normally capitalized in Spanish. They would only get the capitalization at the start of a sentence or in titles.
This would be equivalent to a joker or wild card in English. It is not only used in games though. Sometimes a word can be a comodÃn. I recently heard a Spanish podcaster who used comodÃn when talking about a word that is used to mean whatever you want it to mean.
It is also the word used when doing a computer search and you need a wild card character. Often that is the asterisk (*), wild card or comodÃn.
This week we had a friend who’s father went into the hospital. After he had recovered they were going to darle de alta. Though I had heard the phrase before, it still confused me as to what exactly it meant. Today we were visiting a friend who was telling about her short stay in the hospital after her baby was born two weeks ago. Again, she said “me dio de alta.”
Alto/-a is the adjective high, tall and it can mean halt or stop. To dar de alta means to call to a halt. Idiomatically it means to discharge. The reflexive form, darse de alta means to join, sign-up or enlist.
I mentioned before that leyendo was the gerund form of the verb leer, which means reading and to read. With the -a instead of -o it becomes the noun legend. Leyenda can be a simple story, but would more appropriately be a story that seems larger than life. Sometimes based on fact, sometimes not.
A popular leyenda maya (Mayan legend) is the story of X’tabay.
