El rincón idiomático – Yo, dude!

OK, so using a slang term in another language (or a swear word for that matter) is probably one of the hardest things to accomplish successfully.  When you can do it effectively, without sounding absolutely stupid, then you know you’ve really entered that culture and are completely linguistically accepted. Heck, if I was teaching in my school with my students and trying to use a slang term of their generation in ENGLISH, they’d probably say something, unless they wanted to say nothing just to be nice, to the effect of, “umm… nice try Mr. Rabner but you’re a little old to use that and it’s a little awkward!”.  You know what I mean.  Slang can be really specific to age groups and I’m, frankly, skeptical if I’ll ever get to the point where I can use slang here in Argentina properly and be able to truly get away with it. As much as I don’t mind speaking a lot, and, particularly for an American, I think I speak pretty well, I’m aware of my deficiencies and, honestly, I’m afraid to even TRY to use some real slang because I’m quite confident that it’s going to come out sounding forced, unnatural or just plain wrong.

One of the biggest slang words, used mostly among the “relative” youth and the lower to middle classes is the ubiquitous term che. Che here is a term that has a rough equivalent of the title of this piece – “Yo, dude!”. You can’t use it to refer to a guy, man, chap… in the sense of “ese che non entiende nada“.  This would be better served here in Argentina by other words such as chico, tipo, flaco among others. However, in the sentence, “Dude, what’s up?” here in Argentina che wold fit perfectly, “Che, ¿cómon andás?”. It could also mean something like, “Hey” or “Yo” when you’re trying to get someone’s attention (which, in English, could also be an instance where you say, “dude” as well) in the sense of : “Hey, Marcos, check that out!”, which would be, “Che, Marcos, ¡mirá eso!”. First some reason, though, I can’t think of the word “dude” without thinking of the movie The Big Lebowski!

No one knows the origin of its use for certain.  There are tons of theories. I’m not going to bore you with them. Read this if you’re interested (yes, the word has its own Wikipedia article). However, an interesting note is that the famed Argentine revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara received his nickname “Che” because of his constant and abundant use of the word in his speech. Guevara, in case you didn’t know, was, in fact, Argentine (not Cuban) and before becoming an international communist  revolutionary, driving his motorbike all over South America and starting a successful T-shirt business with his image, was a well-to-do doctoral student from Rosario. He remains a controversial figure here as well as worldwide.

Now, can you imagine Che Guevara going all over the world saying “Dude”? Ok, so you can see the limitations of translations… and the difficulty of trying to do in different cultures is rife with issues.  However, there is no doubt that there is an abundant use of the term, che here and that I can guarantee you all that I will NEVER attempt to use it, like other Argentine slang. I have little doubt that even with my pretty good Spanish, I’ll sound like a complete dork. 🙂

Prof Rabner

P.S. The T-shirt business thing was a joke, in case you didn’t get it.