Winston Manrique Sabogal of El País had a 2013 post “Las palabras más autóctonas de México, Panamá y Uruguay” [The most indigenous/autochthonous words of Mexico, Panama and Uruguay] that chooses three words to introduce the Atlas sonoro de las palabras más autóctonas del español: pinche ‘fucking, goddamned’ for Mexico, sinvergüenzura ‘an act of shamelessness’ for Panama, and celeste ‘pale blue, sky blue’ for Uruguay. Claudia Amengual, who proposed the latter, says it’s not from the uniform color of the Uruguay national soccer team but from the country’s flag, but Marcos in the comments objects, with a learned discussion of a 1910 soccer game; it’s all good fun. Thanks, Y!
Sinvergüenzura is used in twelve countries: Mx, ES, Pa, Cu, RD, PR, Co, Ve, Ec, Pe, Bo, Ch (https://www.asale.org/damer/sinverg%C3%BCenzura).
The adjective pinche ‘fucking, goddamned’ (always presubstantival when modifying a noun) is used in nine: Mx, Gu, Ho, ES, Ni, Co, Ec, Bo, Ur. (https://www.asale.org/damer/pinche).
The adjective celeste ‘pale blue, sky blue’ is universal (no spatial labels here: https://dle.rae.es/celeste?m=form).
Consequently, none of the three meets the requirement of being “el vocablo […] más auténtico o que reflej[a] o represente[a] mejor al respectivo país.”
Or have I misunderstood and the word, when having a certain meaning, need not be used in just one country in order to meet the requirement?
M, pinche, by that dictionary, has different shades of meaning, with different distributions. I.1, with the wide distribution you mention, is ‘Referido a persona o cosa, insignificante, pequeña’. In contrast, I.4 ‘Referido a cosa, maldita, que produce disgusto o rechazo’ is only recorded for Mexico and Guatemala.
I don’t love that last definition. Emphatic sweary noun modifiers are not well described as if they were ordinary adjectives.
The blue in the flag of Argentina is described as “celeste” in the (Spanish) Wikipedia article. From there follows a link to an article about the colour “celeste”, which is defined in HTML as #80BFFF. And the Rio Celeste in Costa Rica, when I visited it, was more or less that colour too.
However it may still be the most autochthonous word in Uruguay, even though the Argentines have appropriated it. That’s a question about Uruguay.
In point of fact, the Argentina national football team (of which I have been a supporter for nigh on sixty years now) is called La Albiceleste.
Comparing the blues of flag stripes, Uruguay’s is much darker than Argentina’s. Comparing the blues of soccer shirts, Argentina’s stripes used to be darker than Uruguay’s solid blue, but in recent decades that had reversed: Argentina has lightened; Uruguay has darkened, though still not as dark as its flag. Which of these blues is too dark to be celeste?
I thought sinvergüenzura was a regular common word, but that must be sinvergüenza I was thinking of.
I never heard pinche in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, or Honduras. One of the first things you notice when you cross the southern border is that all the slang abruptly changes. The changes from North to South in Mexico are more gradual, as are the changes from Guatemala until Costa Rica, where it changes again.
Haven’t been to the other countries and I don’t remember ever hearing celeste.
My impression from meeting hispanohablantes from around the rest of the world is that pinche is one of the signature markers of Mexican Spanish. I may even have to use the overused iconic to describe it.
Son mis dos centavos de todos modos.
“Autochthonous” seems completely the wrong word in English (unless jocularly intended) for what they claim to be talking about even if the claims didn’t have the empirical challenges to their truth they are said by others to have.* But does autóctono/a in Spanish have a different semantic scope than the English word with the same etymology?
*E.g. a lexeme found in New Zealand English but not other Englishes might be plausibly “autochthonous” if it was a loanword from Maori but not if it was just a nonce coinage or an unexpected local semantic repurposing or combination of something from the prior English wordhoard.
But does autóctono/a in Spanish have a different semantic scope than the English word with the same etymology?
I think so, and I was definitely intending it jocularly.
My colleague Celeste is from Argentina. There’s nothing blue about her, though; the intended meaning must be more literal 🙂
Marcos in the comments says that the celeste of the football shirts doesn’t come form the flag, but that doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about whether the use of the word more generally comes from the flag or the football…
As for the flag, apparently the different sides of the war in the 1840s used meaningfully different blues, both the Uruguayans and their supporters in Argentina. Then again, I think a lot of modern discussion of flags overstates the consistency of colours used.
Spaniard here.
“sinvergüenzura” I had never heard, but I’m quite liking it and hope it gets common in Spain 😉
“piche” (in the sense of “cabrón” or “puto”) is, for us, stereotypically Mexican
“celeste” is just the common word for the light blue sky color.
I never heard pinche in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, or Honduras. One of the first things you notice when you cross the southern border is that all the slang abruptly changes.
I would have imagined that “chinga” would do just as well as “pinche” for Mexican Spanish…
There’s an amusing scene in the 1983 film El Norte, where the Guatemalan brother and sister are trying to cross into the US from Mexico, and they ask someone for advice on how, if they are caught, to convince the US Border Patrol to just deport them to Mexico rather than to Guatemala (where they fear being murdered by the corrupt government soldiers who killed their parents). The person they ask tells them to just say “chinga” all the time and the Patrol will assume they are Mexican. (They are caught, and it works.)
I think we can rule out the colour usage being originally taken from either the Uruguayan flag or football uniform, since it is attested some 300 years before the founding of the country:
I would take any claims of it being a geographically marked term with a generous pinch of salt. I can’t trust my own native intuition because it’s clear the term is extant in Rioplatense, but searching CREA for post-90s attestations I found hits for the colour sense from Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico and Spain (besides the expected ones from Uruguay and Argentina) before getting bored.
The CREA/CORDE interface is too poor for me to easily tally the figures, but impressionistically I’d say that bare “celeste” (as opposed to “azul celeste”) sounds a tad fancier outside South America, but is still perfectly common in journalistic or literary prose. In SA the situation seems the converse: bare “celeste” is the norm, and “azul celeste” on the elevated side.
Definitely. The Italian flag is the French flag that Napoleon’s Republican army carried while invading what is now Italy; you didn’t need to be Island Celtic to consider blue vs. green unimportant.
Speaking of blue, the white-blue-white flag of democratic Russia is бело-сине-белый, so the middle stripe is explicitly supposed to be dark blue – but most extant examples use a medium blue that is much lighter than the same stripe on the properly codified white-blue-red flag of imperial Russia.
…though I just noticed, in the same article, that the Russian flag used from 1991 to 1993 used about the same medium shade of blue (and a different format than the current version).
Sure… I was focusing on the idea that the word has taken on meaning beyond just describing a colour, “lo han transformado en una marca de la identidad nacional uruguaya.”
The 1993 flag law definitely deliberately changed the shape of the flag away from the Soviet 1:2 proportions. It also replaced the colour descriptions лазоревого and алого with синего and красного. Wikipedia illustrators use this difference, together with some prominent examples of light blue in flags pre-1993 to support the idea that the colours officially changed. This misinterprets the choice of colour names in a different register (possibly influenced by heraldry) in the 1991 law as being a reference to specific shades, and their replacement with plain colour names as a change in the shades. In reality, like with many flags through history, a range of blues were used in official situations (not to mention other contexts) before 1991, and I expect this continued after the 1993 law to some extent. The codification of the precise shades which are the basis of the Wikipedia illustration of the current flag came many years later.
Of course, even if there isn’t really any good reason to say the blue was lighter in 1991-1993, the fact that Wikipedia has presented it that way for quite a while now means that flags with a lighter blue have been explicitly used for some sort of pre-Putin symbolism in more recent times. The choice of colour in white-blue-white flag examples is influenced by this. In terms of the language used, the Russian article lists both бело-сине-белый and бело-лазо́рево-белый as names for the flag.
That article is a lot more informative than I expected! The section about the meaning of the colors mentions “лазоревый оттенок синего цвета”, the flag of Novgorod and the supposed 1991–1993 flag. whitebluewhite.info explicitly treats синий and лазоревый as different colors; the latter even gets translated as himmelblau “sky-blue” into German (and the former as knalliges Blau “shocky blue”…).
The whole story, plus a grammatical curiosity, seems to be in this article which I haven’t read yet.