Common Expressions
- Paradoxically, in intra-family speech, it is common for husband and wife to address each other as mijo and mija (from mi hijo "my son" and mi hija "my daughter"). And sons and daughters are lovingly called papito ("daddy") and mamita ("mommy"). The latter expressions are especially frequent among lower- and lower-middle-class speakers.
- Sentences are often begun with what seems to be an out-of-place conjunction que ("that"), which makes the sentence sound as if the speaker is delivering a message from a third party. Thus "Que vienen pronto" (" that they are coming soon") for standard "Vienen pronto" ("They are coming soon"), or "Que gracias" (" that thanks") when returning a borrowed item, instead of simply saying "Gracias" ("Thank you"). The use of this added conjunction is also associated with lower- and lower-middle-class speakers. Colombian sources speculate that this usage came from the customary practice of children to run family errands and deliver messages to others in the community—neighbors, butchers, cobblers, etc. Eventually, it is thought, some people started using this form out of habit even when there was no third party involved.
Read more about this topic: Colombian Spanish
Famous quotes containing the words common and/or expressions:
“The classicist, and the naturalist who has much in common with him, refuse to see in the highest works of art anything but the exercise of judgement, sensibility, and skill. The romanticist cannot be satisfied with such a normal standard; for him art is essentially irrational—an experience beyond normality, sometimes destructive of normality, and at the very least evocative of that state of wonder which is the state of mind induced by the immediately inexplicable.”
—Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)
“Many expressions in the New Testament come naturally to the lips of all Protestants, and it furnishes the most pregnant and practical texts. There is no harmless dreaming, no wise speculation in it, but everywhere a substratum of good sense. It never reflects, but it repents. There is no poetry in it, we may say, nothing regarded in the light of beauty merely, but moral truth is its object. All mortals are convicted by its conscience.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)