Botija
A kid, a youngster — the Montevideo word for a child, used for boys and girls alike, where Buenos Aires says "pibe".
Related lesson: Uruguayan Spanish: A Survival Guide.
Hear it in context
Cuando era botija pasaba todos los veranos en Rocha.
When I was a kid I spent every summer in Rocha.
Hay pila de botijas jugando a la pelota en la plaza.
There are loads of kids playing football in the square.
Pará, botija, que vos de esto no sabés nada.
Hold on, kid, you know nothing about this.
What It Actually Means
A botija is a child or a young person, roughly from toddling to late teens, and by extension anyone the speaker is willing to treat as junior. It takes both genders without changing form — el botija, la botija, los botijas — which is unusual enough that learners assume they have misheard. It is the ordinary informal word in Montevideo, sitting alongside gurí / gurisa, which belongs more to the interior, and chiquilín, which skews adolescent.
Where It Comes From
From botija, an earthenware jug — and the explanation everyone in Uruguay offers is the obvious one: a small, round, short child looks like a little jug. It is a folk etymology rather than a documented derivation, and a competing account points at the buried treasure jars of colonial legend, the botijas of hidden money that turn up in stories across the region. The dictionaries record the Uruguayan meaning without settling the origin, and nor should you.
How Natives Use It
Warmly and constantly, as a noun (ese botija es un fenómeno), as a vocative (vení, botija), and adverbially in the fixed phrases de botija and desde botija, meaning “since I was small”. Parents use it about their own children well past childhood. Its cousin botijada — a swarm of kids — turns up when there are too many of them.
Common Pitfall
Aim it downwards in age, not sideways. Between peers botija reads as a put-down: you are telling a grown adult they are out of their depth, which is precisely the move bo is there to avoid. Outside Uruguay it simply means the jug — in Spain, in Mexico, in most dictionaries — and in parts of Central America a botija is a buried pot of treasure, so a sentence about your childhood may land as a sentence about pirates.