An All-Purpose Insult Enhancer
Mark K February 26th, 2008
A few months ago, my son Joe trained to be a line cook at our restaurant. His job was to prepare the various salads and to have them ready at the precise moment when the other line cooks had their appetizers and main courses ready. If one person is slow, the food gets cold, the other cooks grumble, the customer becomes impatient, and the waiter’s tip suffers. It’s a lot of pressure to put on a teenager who is just developing his knife skills and ability to multi-task.
To make matters worse, the culture of the kitchen in a busy restaurant can be a bit rough-and-tumble. At its worse, the vocabulary and style of communication falls somewhere between longshoreman and carney. To complicate matters even more, this colorful exchange is in two languages. The hispanics speak Spanish with one another, those born in the US speak English and then there’s a sort of “restaurant Spanglish” that’s used between the two groups.
Those of us who studied Spanish in school and can understand the “textbook perfect” diction of our high school Spanish teacher don’t stand a chance. There is one word that stands out above all the rest, an all-purpose adjective that crops up in just about every sentence – “pinche” (pronounced peen-chay).
Now, depending on who you ask, this is either a harmless little filler word, or a foul curse. It seems to depend on where you are from. In many Spanish-speaking countries it means something like “insignificant”, “lousy”, “miserable” or “worthless”. It might be used in this context to emphasize the dirtiness of “los pinches platos” or the difficulty of “este pinche trabajo”.
In seems that in Mexico, however, the word has a harsher connotation. The website pinche.com (I kid you not) defines it thusly
In Mexico, “pinche!” is an all-purpose insult enhancer, which is roughly equivalent to the use of “f***ing” in English.
So, this is a long-winded explanation for the purpose of explaining to you how my son Joe became known as “Pinche Yoey”, as in “Pinche Yoey, hurry up and finish the pinche salad so we can serve this pinche food!”
Sure, the older, more experienced cooks were being a little rough on him, but it was also a sign of acceptance that they were teasing him and hanging a nickname on him.
But then I bought a new dictionary for my Spanish class and was checking to see how thorough it was – did it even contain colloquial expressions? I looked up “pinche” and there was the expected definition, “rotten”. But then, there was a second, unexpected definition – “cook’s assistant”!
This changed everything! Joe’s coworkers weren’t teasing or demeaning him – they were calling him by his rightful title! It was a sign of respect!
As it turns out, what they had been saying to him all along was, “Esteemed colleague and assistant chef Joe, please, at your convenience but with a hint of urgency, complete your salad which, next to your impressive talents might seem insignificant, but nevertheless needs to join our comparatively modest dishes.”
Who knew that the meaning of one pinche word could change an entire pinche conversation!
