El rincón idiomático – Am I nitpicking?

When I thought about a way to make this post interesting I had to delve deep into my scalp… I mean brain. I must admit that with my life as busy as ever (hence little time to write) and with 110 posts so far I’m starting to run out of ideas and topics for my posts, especially for the language ones. It’s not like each post I do has just one Spanish word covered… but usually a plethora of Spanish words that are either unique to Argentina or, just creative and interesting to me as far as the Spanish language goes. I always get the ideas but, often, the idea goes into the brain and somehow gets lost when I sit down to write about it. If you have a topic you’d like to suggest, please let me know, por favor! I may be desperate soon!

To be honest, the word/phrase in English “to nitpick” is something I use from time to time. It’s something I do from time to time… that is “look unnecessarily (and annoyingly to others) deeply into small details of a topic to find particulars”… but I’ll admit that until I looked it up I had absolutely no idea what the literal meaning of the phrase meant… or what a “nit” was for that matter. Well, now I know. A “nit”, basically is a “head lice egg” which in Spanish is liendre (or liendra in some countries). Hence to “nitpick” is literally to go searching throughout the hair looking for the tiny nits, I guess… hence the word/expression. Why do I know this… or even care to write about it? Well, when you have kids, “head lice” (which is los piojos in Spanish) is inevitably, at some point, an issue and was in my household for everyone the past month. Thus, the need to treat it, wash everything until they go away (ultimately, it took us a month for the whole process to be complete) and deal with the annoyance of the process. Well, why should you care about this? No reason, probably, but I thought it to be an interesting segue into talking about the topic of “hair”.

When learning Spanish for the first time, in my freshman year of HS, I undoubtedly learned how to talk about (head of) hair – shape, color, etc. Likewise, as a teacher, in Italian or Spanish, I’m pretty sure I’ve always taught kids how to describe one’s hair pretty early on. The interesting thing is that I’ve always used el pelo as the word for hair. Many countries use el pelo colloquially for the hair. However, here in Argentina (as well as other Spanish-speaking countries) “hair (on your head)” is usually known as el cabello. Indeed, in doing some research on the topic el cabello is actually the correct word for the head of hair where as el pelo really refers to an animal’s hair (think “fur” or “pelt”, perhaps), or perhaps, parts of the hair beyond your head. El cabello, also could refer to “one hair” or los cabellos to many hairs. Most of this depends on country and context, of course.

Lastly, since we’re on the subject of hair and, since my kids occasionally expect me to do their hair in the morning I’ve come across a couple of uniquely Argentine terms. Firstly, the concept of “curly” hair here in Argentina is usually enrulado (los enrulos are “curls”) or sometimes crespo whereas most of the Spanish-speaking world says rizado for “curly” (los rizos are “curls”). The word, incidentally, for “straight” hair would be liso or, perhaps, lacio. Also, my kids have el cabello largo and need to put hair bands in their hair every day. Whereas in most countries these are known as las gomas or las ligas here in Argentina they’re known as las vinchas. I’m still working on putting them in their cabellos largos but, as a guy, I have so little experience and just can’t do it like mommy can. What are you gonna do?

Prof Rabner