Sorry Vinny, I didn't see the last line in Nutrax's #4137, so you message was absolutely unintelligible for me. I was sure you've posted it here by mistake, that it was intended for another thread.
So, you've seen "El Secreto de sus ojos". What do you think of the famous scene in the soccer stadium?
Wow nutrax, that means I could buy 17 cars like the one I have now with the money they paid for one bike!!!!
My Spanish teacher is encouraging us to go see El Secreto de sus ojos, but she warned that it was full of "malas palabras". Then again, she said Argentinians talk like that all the time. I haven't seen it yet.
Speaking of Argentina, my son and his wife are here for 2 weeks. They said prices have gone up a lot in Argentina in the past few years. We used the example of the hotel we stayed in -- first time in July 2004, the room cost 86 pesos for 3 of us; in October 2006, it cost about 100; last month it cost 140. Same hotel, and even the same room. I'm no economist so I thought it was inflation, but my son said the exchange rate hadn't changed much, so the Arg $ wasn't losing its value -- just that prices were rising a lot.
But they find Brazil the most expensive country in S America.
Judging from the subtitles, there was no lack of malas palabras in ESDSO.
RIP Hank Jones, dead at 92, the last surviving Jones brother. Elvin played drums for John Coltrane, Thad played trumpet and led a great band alongside Mel Lewis. I learned from the obituaries that Hank was the accompanist on this occasion but that was certainly the least of his accomplishments.
Not every Argentine uses "malas palabras" all the time, it depends on culture and context. Also, when you use one word a lot, it stops being a curse and becomes a tagline and nobody thinks of it as an insult or imprecation. Our youngsters constantly use "boludo/a" when talking to each other, but there's no insult intended, even though the word is an insult and a "mala palabra". In the same line Chilean youths use "huevón" (pronounced and written as "weón") all the time, and Mexicans add "chinga" or "pinche" every two words.
We are having inflation in Argentina. It's now arround 30% per year. The reason for that is that consumption is growing but there's very little investment. The government is constantly pouring pesos in the market but also dollars as they get a lot of them mainly through the export tax on soybeans. That way, the room went from 86 pesos to 140 pesos (a 63% raise) and in the same time, the dollar went from 3,30 to 3,90 (only a 19% raise). We are having high inflation measured in dollars.
Brasil has a worse situation because the dollar value in that same period went down, so everything is very expensive now there.
There's a scene in the 80s movie El Norte where the two lead characters, Guatemalans, have to pass for Mexican, and the brother tells the sister that she has to learn to add "chingado" before every noun.
Many French, especially young ones, use malas palabras all the time, so that the words have lost their original meaning to a great extent. But the word "con" is used by simply everybody as meaning "stupid".
I was saying somewhere on the TT the other day that I'm still not used to the near-universal use of "sucks" in US English.
I left Canada when many words used commonly now in English were considered extremely crude, so I tend to react the same way, Vinny.
There is a whole campaign about the phrase that's so gay.+ Not to "reclaim" the earlier meaning of +gay, (bright, merry, lively), but to get teens to understand that it is a homophobic slur. "When you say 'that's so gay' do you realize what you say? Knock it Off."
Good authors too who once knew better words,
Now only use four letter words
Writing prose, Anything Goes.