Extracts from the best selling book "In the Garlic" by Valerie Collins and Theresa O'Shea Stay a while in Spain, and beyond the sunshine, fiestas, Rioja and laidbackness you may find yourself drifting in an uncharted ocean of unwritten laws, linguistic minefields and mysterious quirks. You need to be In the Garlic – en el ajo – in the know. Extracts from the best selling book "In the Garlic" by Valerie Collins and Theresa O'Shea Stay a while in Spain, and beyond the sunshine, fiestas, Rioja and laidbackness you may find yourself drifting in an uncharted ocean of unwritten laws, linguistic minefields and mysterious quirks. You need to be In the Garlic – en el ajo – in the know.
Ficha One of the great all-purpose words meaning anything from an index card to a file to a domino to a gambling chip to a tiddlywinks counter. Your ficha médica is your medical records, your ficha policial is your police record, and the ficha técnica of your DVD player/talking bathroom scales/digital wok are the technical specifications. In addition, you will hear variants of the word ad nauseam in those noisy football conversations that do not end, alas, with the end of the season, but rather burst forth with renewed vigour; fichar means to sign up, una ficha is a signing or signee, and el fichaje is the signing-on fee or contract. Un buen fichaje is a good catch: employee, team mate, or husband.
Finde Weekend for those under 25, and for those who still think they are. From fin de semana, but hey, colega (think Neil from the Young Ones), what a mouthful, five whole syllables…
Funcionario Government employee. If a machine or a system works well, it is said to funciona bien. Funcionarios, on the other hand, famously don't, or rather do, but as little as possible. A great many people dream of being funcionarios. They study long and hard to become one by passing their oposiciones (competitive exams for government jobs). The pay is not brilliant, but the benefits are great and the hours a dream: 8 am–3 pm with written-in-stone coffee breaks, and reduced hours on Fridays and in the summer. Best of all, short of committing serial murder, it is virtually impossible to get fired or laid off.
García The most common surname in Spain (1,378,000), followed by Fernández, González and Rodríguez.
Gestión This has two main meanings: management, as in, for example, gestión de residuos (waste management) and a negotiation, a sorting out, a bureaucratic or administrative errand, a bit of business. Hacer gestiones can range from solving a minor problem with a bank to major negotiations like pulling troops out of Iraq, and may imply and sometimes require pulling strings. When your building permission gets held up, your architect does gestiones to get it through. Lawyers do gestiones to get their clients out of prison or settle cases out of court. A football club does gestiones to sign Becks or similar. If you don’t feel like answering the phone, and your clients no longer believe the one about being in a meeting, get your secretary to say “she/he’s out haciendo gestiones”. And, it’s understood, God only knows when you’ll be back.
Güisqui Whisky. The Real Academia Española only grudgingly admits foreign words that have no equivalent in Spanish, and only very grudgingly those that are already totally assimilated into the vernacular. They finally deigned to admit whisky, but only by spanglicising the word beyond recognition to a convoluted güisqui (there are no "true" Spanish words spelt with a “w” or “k”). Nobody paid a blind bit of notice and went on drinking “whisky”, or as they say in Andalusia where syllables and letters are knocked back with the tapas, “wi-ki”.
In the Garlic: Your Informative, Fun Guide to Spain is published by Santana and is available at all good book shops (ISBN 13:978-84-89954-59-5)
©Valerie Collins and Theresa O'Shea 2008
