Definition
"Jarabe" is a syrup, and is usually used when talking about medicine (cough syrup is "jarabe para la tos"). "Palo" is a stick. The expression means to "cure" someone by giving them a beating - e.g. saying that a child who is acting up needs "jarabe de palo". The name has a musical double entendre along the lines of drumstick medicine as well as a not so obvious sexual interpretation.
Read more about this topic: Jarabe De Palo
Famous quotes containing the word definition:
“No man, not even a doctor, ever gives any other definition of what a nurse should be than this—”devoted and obedient.” This definition would do just as well for a porter. It might even do for a horse. It would not do for a policeman.”
—Florence Nightingale (1820–1910)
“The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)