Spanish Word of the Day

Quote: Wizard

You can probably guess the assignment for the advanced readers, to compare and contrast fallecer y morir.
I suspect that fallecer is the more fancy way of saying to die.

The two words come from different Latin words that ultimately are ancestors of English words "fail" and "mortal".

I suspect you may be correct, but more like the phrasal verb "He passed away" versus "He died". I would call it more "polite" to use an "eufemismo".

Morir = To die

Fallecer = To pass away, to pass on, to shuffle off this mortal coil, etc.

Quote: Nareed

Fallecer = To pass away, to pass on, to shuffle off this mortal coil, etc.

Personally, I never say somebody "passed away." It seems like an effort to sugar coat death. George Carlin has a great routine on how language has changed to sugar coat hard realities. For example, soldiers don't get "shell shock" any more, it is now "post traumatic stress disorder." Has this phenomena happened with Spanish as well?

Quote: Wizard

Personally, I never say somebody "passed away."

The phrase is very old, but it didn't originally refer to someone's death
Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away. KJV

I read that it started to creep into funeral services in the 1970's and has now become the norm. It seems to bother many people besides yourself.

The American Way of Death is an exposé of abuses in the funeral home industry in the United States, written by Jessica Mitford and published in 1963. Although it was primarily concerned with financial abuse, it did talk about the sentimentality that had crept into the funeral industry which made it more difficult for people to accept the finality of death.

http://theantimedia.org/google-pixel-buds-translate/ Translates 40 languages in real time.

One of the little ways I try to improve my Spanish is to watch English music videos subtitled in Spanish. Sometimes I think the translation doesn't seem like something anyone would say but my level is not sufficient to suggest anything better. With that setup, I was watching Fergie's Big Girls Don't Cry. The line "It's personal, myself and I" was translated to "Es personal, yo y mi otro yo."

Is "otro yo" something people might say in Spanish and what would it mean?


You can skip to the 1:25 point.

Quote: Wizard

Sometimes I think the translation doesn't seem like something anyone would say

Sometimes? :)

Quote:

Is "otro yo" something people might say in Spanish and what would it mean?

1) Never in a million years

2) It means there is no good translation of "myself" to Spanish (or "yourself," "herself," itself," themselves," "ourselves," etc. for that matter). There isn't even a good translation for "self."

Quote: Nareed

2) It means there is no good translation of "myself" to Spanish (or "yourself," "herself," itself," themselves," "ourselves," etc. for that matter). There isn't even a good translation for "self."

Isn't "yo mismo" a close translation? For example, how would you translate "I made it myself."

"El Otro Yo” de 1968 del escritor de nacionalidad uruguaya Mario Benedetti.

I don't know how common it is, but I have seen a few movies and books in English and Spanish titled "The other Me" or "El otro yo".This story by Mario Benedetti seems to be the most famous.

I believe we read this in my Spanish class.

Fecha: 10 de Octubre, 2017
Palabra: Bodega

I'm going to have to post in this thread more often because it just got bumped off the top five threads list.

According to SWD, Bodega can mean a winery, wine cellar, or a store. Why the word for winery is not some derivative of vino, I have no idea. Any why bodega has nothing to do with weddings, like a bridal shop, I have no idea.

I will say that my prior understanding of a bodega was a small store, especially one that might be found in a large city. Never a chain and always operated as a small family business. New York City has lots of them. It does not seem to be as much of a thing on the west coast.

I'll leave it up to the advanced readers to tell me what it really means.

Ejemplo time.

Jerry compró un dosificador de Pez en la bodega. = Jerry bought a Pez dispenser at the store.