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LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

Oysters, not hostias! How to ‘swear’ politely in Spanish

Swearing is accepted in many social contexts in Spain, but if you really need to sugarcoat your curse words, there are many euphemisms and expressions that can help you save face in certain situations.

Funny picture of father-in-law strangling son-in-law
If you don't want to be strangled by your inlaws, you may need to refrain from using actual Spanish swear words at the dinner table. Photo: Javier Pincemin/Flickr

At first, many foreigners who are learning Spanish in Spain are somewhat surprised by the frequency with which swear words – palabrotas or tacos – are dropped in daily speech. 

From grandmothers to young children, swearing is used, accepted and sometimes not even noticed by listeners in many settings.

Be it on the 8 o’ clock news or at the local fruit market, saying tacos generally doesn’t have the same shock factor as it does in English.

But that doesn’t mean that to come across as a local, you have to start swearing like a sailor.  

As just mentioned, swearing is tolerated by many in Spain, but that doesn’t mean it’s commended. 

And there are plenty of social contexts where you want to make sure you don’t drop C (coño) or J (joder) bombs, unless you want to go red in the face (think job interview, kid’s birthday party, meeting the inlaws, staying in the neighbours’ good books).

Luckily, there are a number of euphemisms and expressions that you can resort to milliseconds before you put your foot in it.

¡Ostras! instead of ¡Hostia!

If you’re in the company of religious people who frown on blasphemy, shouting ¡Ostras! (oysters) rather than ¡Hostia/s! (oist, sacramental bread) will get you out of a pickle…unless you’re at a seafood market, then prepare to pay about €20 for a kilo of these molluscs. 

For context, Spaniards shout out hostia or hostias when something surprises them.

couple eats oysters and drinks beer
Mentally stuffing your mouth with oysters will help you keep blasphemy at bay in Spanish. Photo: Chris Graythen/AFP
 
 

¡Jopé! instead of ¡Joder!

Joder in Spanish’s F-word, and although it doesn’t shock as much as its anglo saxon equivalent does English speakers, you may not want to use it in the company of children and their watchful parents. 

Just as common are jo, jolín, jolines, jopelines and jobar, none of which actually have another meaning.

They’re all softer ways of expressing discontent at something, with the first syllable – jo – alluding to joder without actually saying it. It’s similar to saying flip in English.

¡Mecachis…! instead of ¡Me cago en…!

As you may be familiar with already, when Spaniards want to express anger, the often linguistically ‘crap on’ things (me cago en…), be it the salty sea,  the milk or someone’s relative. 

Mecachis is a way of alluding that you’re verbally defecating on something, without having to actually say it. 

It can be used on its own or if you want to add some flair, mecachis en la mar ( polite version of ‘cr*p in the sea’) is also widely accepted.

boy holds fist in anger, polite swearing in spanish
Mecachis is a good word to avoid being a potty mouth. Photo:Anna Kovalchuk/Pixabay
 

READ ALSO: What’s the worst possible insult you can say to someone in Spain?

¡Córcholis! Instead of ¡Cojones!

Cojones as you may know already, cojones is Spanish slang for testicles. It’s meant to be the Spanish word with most derivative meanings, with even the number of cojones giving different meanings to expression (one cojón expensive, two for bravery, three for disregard). 

Despite the lexical wealth that cojones words and sayings grant Spanish speakers, they’re not to everyone’s liking.

Using córcholis gets around this problem, at least when wanting to express surprise politely, not to refer to male genitalia.

¡Miércoles! instead of ¡Mierda!

Shouting Wednesday is the chosen way to avoid poop-themed expletives in Spanish.  

Again, miércoles shares the first syllable as mierda, so it’s similar to English speakers saying sugar or shoot to not say shit. 

angry woman swearing, how to swear politely in spanish
Take your mind of swearing by shouting nobody’s favourite day of the week. Photo: Dead Cat/Flickr

¡Caray! instead of ¡Carajo!

Shouting caray is a bit like saying good heavens, wow or damn in English. 

Caramba is also an alternative, although you’re more likely to hear Bart Simpson use it in English than in the streets of Madrid or Barcelona. 

Carajo is a vulgar way of referring to a penis, although in Spain it’s rarely used like this in modern speech, but rather is added at the end of sentences to round off your anger (¡Vete de aquí, carajo! – Just leave, damn it!) or to say what the hell..? (¿qué carajo + verb?).

Caray however is usually used by itself, often to express surprise or shock in a mild manner. 

¡Me importa un pepino! instead of ¡Me importa una mierda!

When saying ‘I couldn’t give a damn’, Spaniards say me importa followed by una mierda (sh*t), una polla (d*ck), un coño (p*ssy) or any other swear word that springs to mind. 

But if they want to avoid filthy talk, they usually resort to a healthy assortment of vegetables to do the explaining for them. 

Therefore, ‘not giving a cucumber’ is one of several ways of expressing disdain without actually swearing. 

You can use ¡Me importa un pimiento! (I couldn’t give a pepper!, ¡Me importa un rábano! (I couldn’t give a radish) or ¡Me importa un comino! (I couldn’t give any cumin). 

Interestingly, British English speakers also say ‘not give a fig’ about something.

man holding giant cucumber
Turning your attention to the little importance vegetables have in life should help you stop swearing in Spanish. Photo: Oli Scarf/AFP

¡Vete a freír espárragos! instead of ¡Vete a tomar por culo!

Again, the foodie theme prevails when it comes to Spaniards respectfully telling someone to get lost. 

‘Go and fry asparaguses’ is perhaps the most interesting of the available euphemisms, which we can only assume relates to getting…erm…rodgered (How? We don’t know).  

There’s also “¡Vete a tomar por saco!”, which certainly serves as an alternative to vete a tomar por culo (get done up the backside, but similar to f*ck off or f*ck you in English). Centuries ago, saco (sack) used to be the name Spaniards used to refer to their undergarments, so you get the drift.

You can also use ¡Vete a tomar vientos! (Go get some wind) and ¡Vete a paseo! (Go for a walk). 

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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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