Sunday, February 28, 2010

Pinche idiota

Pinche is one of those words I like to call a "sentence enhacer".  It puts extra emphasis on the subject matter at hand.

If you've been studying Spanish for a while, you've likely heard the word pinche.  Especially if you've been in any type of social setting where people start letting their hair down.  A few chelas bien fría (nice cold beers) and all of sudden the Spanish language starts getting a little more colorful.  Although some people don't need beer for that. 

So what does "pinche" mean?  It's somewhere between damn, god-damn and fucking in English, depending on who you ask.  But my understanding is that it's closer to "fucking".  Either way, we don't really need an exact translation, what we do need to know is that "pinche" is a pretty strong word, so it's not for polite company.

Let's look at our example sentence:

Pinche idiota
Fucking idiot

Sure, calling someone an idiota is a pretty good insulto (insult), but when you throw in our sentence enhancer, pinche, now you're getting serious! 

Let's try a few more:

Ese pinche carro es una porquería
That fucking car is a piece of junk

Me cae mal ese pinche cabrón
I don't like that fucking asshole

You can throw in pinche just about anywhere:

Pinche pendejo
Fucking dumbass

Pinche taxi
Fucking taxi

Pinche viejo
Fucking old man

In fact, I actually heard someone use "pinche vieja" in a restaurant one day, it gave me a good chuckle. 

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this pinche entrada (blog post). 

Goodbye for now amigos!

2 comments:

  1. LOL, it is one very common word, and one of those words you'd call very versatile. An interesting fact is that any bad word, at least in Spanish, comes from a normal, non-bad word which is not commonly heard. For the example at hand, "Pinche" actually means "Ayudante de cocinero" something like "Cook's assistant", but being a very unused word, it became a bad worse with a completely different meaning.

    Searching for something of my job I found this link which I think could come very useful for you Rodney, you should check it out, it's in Spanish but it's really worth it: "http://www.asihablamos.com/"

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  2. Jajajaa!! So fun!! So real!!

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