#romance languages
la zalamería | Spanish, “flattery.”
no me vengas con zalamerías = stop trying to butter me up
I really like this word, because it’s very connected to Arabic.
La zalamería is related to the Spanish word la zalema which is the transcribed version of “salaam”. That’s the Arabic greeting, but la zalema also refers to “the act of bowing deeply”.
So when it's la zalamería it brings up the idea of “someone trying to get on your good side by paying you a lot of respect”, since the imagery is someone bowing or groveling.
There’s a word, I don’t know how widely used it is, but the adjective zalamero/a can mean “flatterer” or “affectionate”. It almost has the connotation of being “cloyingly nice” or “clingy”.
The more Latin form of “flattery” is la lisonja which is connected to the adjective liso/a for “smooth”.
i say we start a meme where we take jokes that don’t work in other languages and translate them without explanation maybe only tagging with the original language and confuse the heck out of everyone on tumblr who’s not in on the meme like
in italian we say “prince light blue” (prince azzurro) instead of “prince charming” and i just saw a joke that in english would be “if you can’t find your prince charming, the solution is to take a random dude from the street and paint him”
Useful french stuff that we never learned at uni but french people use all the time:
se figurer - technically means imagine, but usually used in the sense of get this, guess what, you won’t believe it
Figure-toi qu'il en a trois !
Get this, he has three of them!
