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May 23, 2007
el soplón
I was reading the subtitles in Los Tres Huastecos and the word soplón was used to falsely describe an average José that everyone liked, justifying his being killed by El Coyote, a wild outlaw, whose true identity was unknown. I looked the word up, and I read:
soplón,-ona m,f fam (chivato) grass, informer
(acusica) sneak, telltale
Grass? I'd never heard the word 'grass' used as a synonym for 'informer.' But there among the meanings of 'grass' that I do know, was this British slang sense of the word, in Merriam-Webster:
2. slang British : inform 2 — often used with on
Of course, this uses the word 'grass' as a verb. It's not listed in the entry for the word's sense as a noun. In the Mexican film, the subtitles used it as a noun, as in, "He was a drunk and a grass."
The subtitles could be taking this wrong, or my dictionary might be less than exhaustive. I'm not so concerned with that. I just think it's interesting that in studying and learning Spanish, I often learn things about English that I never knew before.
It might be the one thing with which I agree with President Bush: it's good to study a foreign language!
Posted by crispy at May 23, 2007 04:26 AM
Comments
Yes, there's lots of weird slang out there. Here's an article in Wikipedia about Cockney Rhyming Slang:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockney_rhyming_slang
Posted by: Dave C. at May 31, 2007 04:43 PM