Tag Archives: language

What Fart?

Inspired, Life in the Yucatan, Nada que Ver,

A deep dive – plug your nose – into the bowels of Mexican slang.

Pedo, in Mexico, is not a pedophile. Hopefully your search engine and those algorithms at Google et al won’t punish you for reading this. Did you turn off your cookies?

A pedo is a fart, but the word is so much more versatile than just describing the (hopefully) occasional escaping of noxious fumes from one’s behind. It is a most amazing and useful term that can be applied in all manner of situations from when one is pleasantly inebriated to those that could be defined as unmistakably problematic.

¿Que pedo? is a greeting, which could be friendly and also threatening depending on the tone and body language employed when emitting the statement. Literally “what fart?” it’s meaning can range from the friendly “what’s happening” to the aggressive “what are you looking at” common at bars in the sketchier neighborhoods of northern Mexican cities.

Tengo un pedo is the lament of someone who has a problem and is coming to you for help or comfort.

No hay pedo means there is no problem at all, really. You asked someone to help you with a ride to the mall or home from the bar and you thank them and this is an acceptable reply.

Speaking of bars and such, you might be drinking a lot and become pedo. You see it also means “drunk” and can even be turned into a descriptor for the entire process of getting to be pedo in the first place. An extended bout of alcohol consumption resulting in unconsciousness or comas is called a peda.

From pedo come derivations and permutations. Un pedorro is what you call someone who is a braggart, who is constantly on about how great he is, how shiny his car is, how he is rolling in money and so on. He is a great farter.

Note that the use of pedo in everyday conversation should be limited to people with whom one is comfortably familiar. This is not something that should come up in a chat with your bank teller, your doctor or the lady that comes to clean your house on Thursdays.

The lady that comes on Tuesday? It’s fine. No hay pedo.

May 18, 2020. On Hunkering… Down

Life in the Yucatan, , , , , , , , , , ,

Some new words and phrases have entered out lexicon, hand in hand with COVID19: social distancing, N95 facemasks, PPE, shelter-in-place and more. One term I have seen used all over the place – and used myself – is the phrase hunkering down. Everyone is hunkering down these days.

Hunkering sounds to me like something out of a Robert Louis Stevenson novel, something a sailor might be doing, crouched on an island in a shelter made out of palm fronds along with bits and pieces rescued from a broken sailing vessel. Or a man stranded alone in the mountains, protected from the elements by pine and fir branches, perhaps staring out at a small fire sputtering in the drizzle directly outside.

It is rare if not impossible to find hunkering all by itself. You can’t just hunker. “I’ll be hunkering over here for a while” just doesn’t work. You have to hunker … down.

Dictionary.com has five definitions but it is the third one on the list that definitely applies at this moment:

“to settle into the safety of one’s home or other designated shelter for a potentially long time, as would be necessitated by a natural disaster or an outbreak of a contagious disease”

It’s first recorded usage dates back to the early 1700’s and is possibly derived from the Old Norse hüka which means ‘to crouch’ This in turn is similar to the old Dutch huiken or modern German hocken, both of which mean ‘to squat or crouch’ so that theory seems to make perfect sense.

To my untrained ear it sounds very old-British and some have even traced its use back to Scotland. I fact, the Oxford English Dictionary describes how to hunker: “squat, with the haunches, knees and ankles acutely bent, so as to bring the hams near the heels (hams? really?) and throw the whole weight upon the fore part of the feet”.

An interesting and digressive factoid: the term was popularized in south-western United States dialect form by U.S. President Johnson in the 1960’s.

No matter its origins; while the hunkering down we are doing is less about crouching on haunches in the wild, it is about staying in one place, safe from the outside world and its inherent and contagious dangers, and staring – like the shipwreck victim or the mountain man – balefully out at the bleak world just beyond our shelter.