Words That Are Perfectly Innocent in Spain and Filthy in Mexico

Every guide tells you the same thing: never say coger in Mexico. Then you open El Colegio de México’s dictionary and find coger un camión printed as an ordinary example of the verb.¹

Both are true. The rule you were given was just the wrong shape.

Coger, and the test that actually works

The Mexican entry for coger runs to five numbered groups. Four of them are innocent, and they are not dead usages either: picking something up, catching a cold, taking a street, catching the meaning of something, getting hit by a bus, catching somebody in the act.¹

The vulgar sense is group five, and it appears in two shapes only. Cogerse a alguien, reflexive, with a person. Or plain coger with nothing after it at all.¹

So the test is grammatical. Look at what follows the verb.

None of which is an invitation. Most Mexicans reach for agarrar or tomar without thinking about it, so outside older speech you will hardly ever hear the innocent version anyway, and a sentence can be technically clean and still get a laugh because everybody in the room knows the other reading is sitting right there.

You are learning this so you understand the guy at the bus stop. Not so you can say it.

Pinche is an insult and a job title in the same entry

Open pinche in the same dictionary and you get two roman numerals. The first is marked coarse: despicable, mean, cheap, low quality. The second carries no marking at all and reads, flatly, assistant, especially in a kitchen.²

Nobody retired the kitchen sense to make room for the insult. Both are in print right now (same word, same page). A restaurant in Spain advertising for a pinche de cocina is hiring, not swearing.

The three that get people

Chaqueta is a jacket. It is also, marked as popular usage in the same entry, male masturbation, in the fixed phrase hacerse una chaqueta.³ Compliment somebody’s chaqueta and nothing bad happens. But the Mexican word for the garment is chamarra, so the other one flags you as foreign well before anybody gets to the second meaning.

Culo runs the other way, and it catches Spaniards rather than Americans. The Mexican dictionary marks it coarse and offensive.⁴ In Spain it is mild enough for daytime television. Say trasero, pompas or nalgas.

Panocha is the one where the two meanings sit furthest apart. Larousse’s Mexican gastronomy dictionary has it as a truncated cone of unrefined sugar, another name for piloncillo or panela.⁵ The other sense is vulgar and anatomical.⁶ The stall is not making a joke when it says it.

Three warnings that are not about Mexico

The rest of what you were probably warned about is not a Mexican problem at all.

Paja. You were told a straw is pajita in Spain and that you must never ask for one in Latin America. The Mexican dictionary’s entry for paja gives dried stalks for animal feed and hats, plus ser pura paja, meaning padding or waffle.⁷ The masturbation sense is not recorded there. Say popote, because that is the Mexican word for a straw. Not because the other one is dangerous.

Acabar. The warning is that ¿ya acabaste? means asking whether somebody climaxed. The Mexican entry runs through finishing homework, drinking a glass of milk, wearing out shoes, exhausting an animal, a film ending at ten.⁸ No sexual sense listed. Ask freely.

Concha. A seashell, and a sweet bread with a shell-patterned sugar crust that is on the counter of every bakery in the country. The vulgar reading is Argentine and Uruguayan. People arrive with the River Plate warning and apply it a continent away.

Why the map is this messy

Humberto López Morales, writing about the Diccionario de americanismos for the Instituto Cervantes, makes the point that the dictionary is descriptive rather than prescriptive, and deliberately does not suppress terms the community treats as malsonantes, tabuizados, vulgares. It marks them, and it arranges its countries geographically so you can see where a usage starts and stops.⁹

So the mess is deliberate. A reference book like that is recording where a word offends rather than ruling on whether it should, which is also why nobody has ever handed you one list of forbidden words that works across the language. There is not one to hand over.

What to say instead

Two problems get bundled together here, and they are not the same problem. This page is about accidentally saying something obscene. Sounding foreign is separate, with separate fixes, and the Spanish that is correct but strange in Mexico covers that one.

You will not be running the test for long. The substitutions in that left column turn into the words you reach for without deciding to, and after that the question mostly stops coming up. Mostly.