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Remote office slang: Nine native expressions to use with Spanish work colleagues online

As many people in Spain are working from home during the pandemic and communicating with their Spanish colleagues online, understanding the most common expressions used in a Spanish remote working environment is more important than ever if you don’t want to get lost in translation. ¡Manos a la obra! (Let’s get down to it!).

spanish office slang
Do you know someone in Spain who's 'made their August'? Photo: Shuttestock

Tener enchufe – To have friends in high places

Knowing the right people is a chief concern for many Spanish workers as it’s pretty much endemic in all professional fields, especially among the country’s political and business elite. To have enchufe, which literally means ‘a socket’ like the one you plug your gadgets into, is often more important than your skills and qualifications for a Spanish employer looking to help out a friend or a relative. You can also describe a person with good connections as enchufado, plugged in. 

Photo: Jono/Pixabay

Lameculos – Brown-noser or arse-licker

Spanish speakers have a few other ways of describing colleagues who suck up to the boss or for anyone else who is too eager to please another person: pelota‘ (ball in Spanish) or perrito faldero (lapdog).  

Photo: No-longer-here/Pixabay

Hacer su agosto – To feather one’s nest or make one’s pile.

If you know someone who found a niche for themselves in the business world and is now making a killing, in Spanish you say they’ve ‘made their August’ and they’re wrapping themselves up, forrándose. If someone is deemed to have a carefree and opulent lifestyle, Spaniards say they live like a marquis or a king, vivir como un marqués or vivir como un rey

Photo: Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels

Ser un/a trepa – To be an arriviste or a go-getter

If a colleague is easily and unscrupulously making their way up the company ladder, you colloquially refer to them as a ‘climber’ in Spanish.

Photo: Shutterstock

Dar carpetazo – To shelve something

In business Spanish, if a work project or assignment is getting nowhere and you decide to put it aside, you ‘smash the file’.

Photo: Shutterstock

Escurrir el bulto – To pass the buck 

When someone cheekily passes off work or responsibilities to other colleagues in the workplace, they ‘drain the lump’ (as weird as it may sound) in Spanish. 

Comerse el marrón – get lumbered with work

In Spanish, the person stuck with the work after their colleague passed the buck to them has to ‘eat the brown’. Un marrón in Spanish is also a way of referring to something that’s a problem, a mess or a drag.

Photo: Alexas Photos/Pixabay

Pringar – To slog it out

Working long hours is commonplace in Spain. The two-hour lunch break some companies gave their workers in pre-pandemic times makes the working day that much longer but pringar, which can also mean to get dirty, is what really keeps employees in the (home) office until after the sun has set. 

office slang spainPhoto: Ryan McGuire/Pixabay

Finiquito – severance pay

The money you get from an employer who sacks you is usually referred to in Spanish with this colloquial term rather than with the more formal ‘indemnización’. There’s also the verb finiquitar, which means to pay severance pay or wrap up. 

Unfortunately, there isn’t a literal translation for golden parachute or golden handshake; you might say instead the person got a lot of ‘pasta‘ (Spanish slang term for money). By the way, finiquito can also be used for the final payment you get when you’ve completed your contract.

Photo: FABIO MUZZI / AFP

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SPANISH LANGUAGE

What is Spain’s inclusive language debate and why is it so controversial?

Plans to change the name of Spain's Congress of Deputies for it to not just be the masculine form has reopened the debate about whether Spanish is a sexist language.

What is Spain's inclusive language debate and why is it so controversial?

Plans to make the name of Spain’s Congress of Deputies more inclusive has reopened a long-running and controversial debate about where the Spanish language (more specifically, its gendered grammar) fits into it all.

For non-native Spanish speakers or those without a grasp on Spanish grammar, some of this might seem a little strange. This is especially true for English speakers as most English nouns, adjectives and definite articles do not use grammatical gender forms like in Spanish.

The proposal, put forward by governing coalition partners Socialists (PSOE) and far-left Sumar, is to change the name of Spain’s Congress of Deputies to make it more inclusive. To do so, they want to change it from El Congreso de los Diputados to simply Congreso, thereby removing the masculine gendered los and -o word ending from the name.

The change would be just one consequence of the wider rewriting of Congressional customs to adapt it to inclusive language. The proposal has been backed by left-wing parties and smaller nationalist groups that support the government, but rejected by the right-wing Partido Popular (PP) and far-right Vox.

In February, a body within the Spanish Congress issued recommendations on the use of inclusive language in official documents, then also with the support of the PP. In September 2023, official co-languages including Basque, Catalan and Galician were adopted for use for the first time.

READ ALSO: Why Spain has allowed regional languages to be spoken in Congress

The grammar behind it all

The clash seems to be grammar versus inclusivity or political correctness. Much of this is rooted in Spanish grammar rules, namely how the masculine form dominates when including both sexes in collective nouns. What does that mean?

Essentially, that because Spanish is a gendered language and nouns are given a gender – el libro (the book) is masculine, for example, and la casa (the house) is feminine.

It gets complicated with collective nouns, in other words, when a group of something (usually people) contains both males and females, the default collective noun in Spanish is almost always the masculine version.

For example, the word for parents in Spanish is padres, which could be understood to just mean dads, even though Spaniards instinctively understand that it can, in many cases, also be used to signify the plural ‘parents’ and include both mother (madre) and father (padre). 

In the case of the Congress, the solution seems to be to simply remove the gendered language. However, in other cases the drive for gender inclusivity actually goes and step further and changes the language itself.

If you live in Spain, you might’ve seen that some people (usually very politically engaged, almost always very left-wing) choose to say, though it is more often written on social media platforms, amigues rather amigos so it isn’t masculine and includes both amigas and amigos, the feminine and masculine forms of friends.

This trend is in many ways similar to moves in the United States to use a gender neutral form for Latinos and Latinas, Latinx, something that receives a lukewarm response from most Latinos themselves.

Backlash from Spain’s language academy

The steps to make language more inclusive has received backlash from the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) over the years, which, among other things, criticises attempts to do away with the exclusive use of the generic masculine when referring to people of both sexes, claiming it could “increase the distance with the real world” of the language used in institutions. In other words, politicians adopting politically correct language that real Spaniards don’t use on the street.

The Royal Spanish Academy suggests that “inclusive language” is a wider strategy that aims to avoid the generic use of the grammatical masculine, something the academy (the body entrusted to safeguard the Spanish language) states to be “a mechanism firmly established in the language and that does not involve any sexist discrimination.”

However, it should also be said that the demographic makeup of RAE members is, as one might’ve guessed, not as representative as it could be.

Yet the argument by RAE and many in Spain, particularly on the political right, is essentially that efforts to make language more inclusive is politicisation of non-political grammar rules.

An academy note from February stated that “artificially forcing” the grammar and lexicon of the Spanish language to fit political correctness does necessarily advance the democratic struggle to achieve equality between men and women.

A far-left policy?

Perhaps the most public proponent of making the Spanish language more inclusive is Irene Montero, the highly divisive former Equalities Minister who was member of Unidas Podemos, a far-left party. For Montero, changing gendered nouns in Spanish is not just about removing the traditional masculine collective noun, but also making language more inclusive for non-binary people.

The Minister stated in an interview in 2021 that the use of “hije” (the ‘gender neutral’ version of hijo/hija, meaning son or daughter) is to refer to non-binary people who, Montero said, “have every right to exist, even if it is strange and difficult to understand”.

For Montero and proponents of more inclusive language, “there is nothing more political than the use of the neutral masculine gender” and changing words serves “to modify habits or prejudices”.

“It is no coincidence that the masculine has been used as something neutral and women have reclaimed the language so it speaks for us. If we contribute on an equal footing with men in essential tasks we have every right to be named [properly] and the same happens with the LGTBi collective,” she said.

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