For those of you who were so blessed as to receive the inculcations of traditional Spanish in American school: fasten your seatbelts, twist your pristine horizons of frases y parafos into the inverted position, y estaí como un pez en agua… cachaí?! All those years of instruction, of infinite memorization of vocabulary words que se puede apilar tan grande como los Andes, of merciless grammar rules and rigid sentence structures, de examenes y pruebas y ensayos y actividades de escuchar, all in vain as I am greeted with an animated, “Como taí, hue'ón?” upon entering the hotel in Santiago.
Como taí...? Espera…what?!?!
When speaking informally in the second person, I was taught to conjugate “estar,” an “ar” verb free of twists and turns, with the suffix “ás.” Therefore, the correct pronunciation when questioning my mental, physical, social, and economic state, also known as my phenomenal being, would be: “Cómo estás.” Furthermore, this “huevón” creature, a slinking ghost of a word absent from my mental dictionary as well as my paperback, elicits images of cracking eggs, sweating and frying in a bubbling pan. I thought, maybe he’s talking about my forehead, slaked with sticky sweat and Economy-section loam from the long flight; I heard from friends that Chileans are known for creating nicknames from physical features, not as a pejorative practice, but rather an affectionate one. Even so, I became more self-conscious: was I an egghead? Did I seem feminine (there is nothing more clearly feminine than an ova) or perhaps masculine (then again, maybe I am perceived as king of the eggs…)? Instead of playing a guessing game, I just asked for the English translation, and of course, the response was very clear: “Pues…huevón can be like…anything. I don’t know…you just…you just say “huevón” al fin y…it’s like…” We were getting nowhere, the Chilean language slowly melting into a pool of unpinchable mercury, a colorless stain on the linguistic fabric.
“…its like…dude.”
Yes.
Dude.
Excellent, as Ted would say (for those of you who have seen the film, and for those of you who have not, but still believe in The Excellent Adventure).
My first, and most important, Chleanismo.
I learned much later that “huevón” functions like the word “bro” in the pseudo-hyper-masculine sphere of American fraternities. These words are dropped like Lehman Brothers from portfolios or Chilean copper prices from ’06 levels. And in Chilean, this word is transformed into a verb, and even used in place of words for no reason at all, simply at the discretion of the speaker. As far as nouns are concerned, all things “hue” are chameleons, relying exclusively on context to retain their place and legitimacy in the lexicon.
As I begin my work here (which I will discuss in my next entry) and interact more with Chilean culture, I’m sure I will have many numerous, if not never-ending, encounters with Chilean slang. And I promise, I will do my best to make these nouveau discoveries a subtle motif in my future posts. But I thought, considering “huevón” is the “bro” of Chilean slang, I would make this one completely about language, because words connect people, connect cultures, connect nations, connect the world, and thus, whether in Chile or New York or Beijing, we all move across the universe as one. Cachaí? (You feel me?) I know, that’s deep…huevón.
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