Writing down the Mexican Spanish I kept having to ask about, from
Mexico City, a few months at a time
The first time I landed
I came to Mexico for the first time about three years ago, without much
of a plan and without expecting it to turn into anything. I stayed two
weeks and spent most of them walking around not understanding very much.
What got me was ordinary stuff: the quiet streets in Condesa,
the coffee shops in Roma where nobody minded how long you sat there, and
then the Zócalo end of the city, which is louder than any of that and took
me a lot longer to get used to.
My Spanish wasn't good when I arrived, so I signed up for classes. There
was less grammar in them than I expected. We'd sit in the parks and talk
about how things work here, the customs, the food, why people do what they
do. I got more out of those afternoons than out of the exercises, and I
still catch myself repeating things I first heard in one.
Around this time I was still mostly nodding along.
After that I kept finding reasons to stay longer. There was a balloon over
the pyramids at Teotihuacán at sunrise, and a first date that turned into
kayaking at Xochimilco. Then further out: a few weeks in Mérida and Playa
del Carmen, a stretch in Oaxaca that was mostly an excuse to eat, and
quieter places like Tuxtla Gutiérrez that don't come up on many
itineraries. There's still a long list I haven't got to.
Día de Muertos, in a market full of papel picado.Hierve el Agua in Oaxaca. It looks like a waterfall from a distance; up close it's mineral deposits on rock.A balloon ride over the pyramids at Teotihuacán.
Why this site exists
I've also lived in Colombia and in Argentina, and the longer I spent
moving between them the more I kept ending up in the same kind of
conversation: how differently people say things that mean roughly
the same. Someone would use an expression that made no literal
sense and everyone at the table knew what it meant. I started keeping
notes on those, mostly for myself, and after a while there were enough of
them that it made sense to put them somewhere.
These days it goes the other way as well. My Mexican friends send me
phrases, and they laugh at the ones I've managed to notice on my own. A
fair number of entries here started life in a WhatsApp thread, which is
also a good place to watch Google Translate hand over the
words and leave out who says them, to whom, and how it lands.
So this is for people in the position I was in: wanting the Spanish people
use rather than the textbook version, and wanting to understand the place
a bit better while they're at it. How people talk to each other tells you
a lot about where you are, more than I expected before I started paying
attention.
How a word gets written
Most entries start with something I heard and didn't understand, or
understood wrong. From there they go through the same five steps.
Ask someone who grew up with the word
Before opening a dictionary. It's the step that catches the words a
dictionary defines correctly and still can't prepare you for.
Check it against the formal record
The RAE's Diccionario de la lengua
española for the standard Spanish meaning, and the
Diccionario del Español de México from
El Colegio de México for what the word does here.
They disagree fairly often, and when they do I try to say so on the
page rather than pick a winner. For contested etymologies I also check
the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua, the
Instituto Cervantes and Fundéu.
Go to the institution when the topic stops being linguistic
Plenty of posts touch history, food heritage, consumer rules or
paperwork, and those don't belong to a dictionary. Those cite the body
responsible: INAH and UNESCO for
heritage, Profeco for prices and consumer rights,
UNAM for research, SEDENA or the
relevant gob.mx page for anything official. Where a
claim comes from somewhere specific, I link it.
Write the examples last, and read them out loud
If a line doesn't sound like something someone would say out loud, it
gets cut and rewritten. Most of the rewriting on any entry happens
here.
Drop it rather than soften it
A card that's slightly off is worse than no card, because someone will
go and repeat it. When I can't fix a draft I leave it unpublished
instead of hedging the wording until it's safe to put up.
Across the 146 posts published so far that comes to
864 linked sources from
117 publishers and institutions, listed
at the bottom of each post. There are 102 word entries
written the same way.
Where AI fits, and where it doesn't
I draft with help from AI. I'd rather say that plainly
than have you work it out.
It speeds up the research pass and gets a first draft onto the page. What
I don't let it near is what a word means, or the tone: whether something
is warm or rude, whether you can say it to a boss, whether it only works
with friends. Tone is the part I'm least willing to hand over,
partly because a model will give you a fluent, confident answer whether or
not it has any idea.
Nothing goes up as drafted. I rewrite each entry by hand, check it against
the sources above, and read it against how the people I know here talk.
Some drafts don't make it past that.
I put this here rather than in a footer because it's part of why the steps
above exist at all. Something that can produce plausible Spanish on demand
needs more checking than most sources do, not less.
What I'm not
I'm not a linguist, a native speaker or a teacher, and I haven't lived a
whole life here. A few months a year is a real limit on
what I can know, and it shows up in what I'm able to write about.
What I do have is the experience of learning this vocabulary from the
outside, slowly, by getting it wrong in public and having someone kindly
explain why the table had gone quiet. So the pages are written from that
side of it: what I had to work out, checked with people who already knew,
rather than an explanation of how Mexicans speak.
When a word is regional or generational, or lands differently depending on
who's around, I say so on the page, and I say when I'm not sure.
Corrections are the mail I like getting most, especially from native
speakers. If something here is wrong, or off in a way that's hard to name,
the contact page has the address.
Find me elsewhere
These are two different things. The site's accounts post the daily words;
mine are more travel and whatever I'm building.
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