Refranes y dichos — Sayings and Expressions

A hundred lessons in, and what to do with a proverb

This is lesson 100, which is as good a place as any to say something about how idiom fits into a language you are learning as an adult. Fixed expressions are the part of a language that most resists study, because they are not generated by rules — they are remembered whole. That cuts two ways. It means you cannot work them out: no amount of Spanish grammar will get you from tener morro to having a nerve, and a dictionary that gives you the words separately actively misleads you. But it also means that once you have one, you have it permanently, and that a modest stock of them does a great deal of work. Twenty dichos used correctly will make your Spanish sound more native than two hundred abstract nouns. The proverbs are a different case, and Spanish makes the distinction for you: un dicho is an expression, un refrán is a proverb with a moral. Spain has thousands of refranes and older speakers can produce them for any situation — there is a Centro Virtual Cervantes refranero with more than seven thousand entries, and Don Quijote is partly a novel about a man who speaks in them. They are genuine cultural inheritance and worth understanding. They are not worth deploying by a learner, for the reason the Abuela gives: they are performances, they depend on exact wording, and a half-remembered one lands as a mistake rather than as a flourish. The failure mode is specific and unkind — you sound like somebody who has learned Spanish from a book, which is precisely the impression the rest of this course has been trying to remove. There is also a generational point. A Spaniard of eighty uses refranes constantly; a Spaniard of twenty-five uses very few, and often only ironically or in the truncated half-form. What has replaced them in younger speech is a different set of fixed expressions — the en plan and qué fuerte and me flipa of lesson 93 — which are just as formulaic and just as unanalysable. So the skill is the same skill; only the inventory has changed. A practical method, if you want one. Collect them from conversations rather than from lists: write down the expression, who said it, and what was happening, because the situation is what tells you the register. Use one only after you have heard somebody use it to you. And when you do not know one, ask — ¿qué quiere decir eso? is a perfectly good question, and in Spain it will get you an explanation, an example, and very probably three more expressions you did not ask for.