Chochada
A thing, a whatsit — or nonsense, a triviality, something not worth the breath spent on it.
Related lesson: Nicaraguan Spanish: A Survival Guide.
Hear it in context
Pasame esa chochada que está sobre la mesa.
Pass me that thing on the table.
No perdás tiempo con esa chochada.
Don't waste time on that nonsense.
Se enojó por una chochada, de verdad.
He got angry over absolutely nothing, honestly.
What It Actually Means
Chochada is Nicaragua’s all-purpose noun, and it points in two directions at once. Concretely it is a thing — the object you cannot name, the gadget, the bit — so dame esa chochada is “give me that whatsit”. Abstractly it is a triviality: nonsense, rubbish, a fuss about nothing, the argument that was not worth having. Which one is meant is never in doubt from the sentence.
Where It Comes From
Nobody can point to a clean origin. It plainly belongs to the same family as ¡chocho!, the Nicaraguan exclamation of surprise — heard so often that Costa Ricans nickname Nicaraguans chochos for it — but whether the noun came from the interjection or both descend from something older is not established, and the honest answer is that it is undocumented. What can be said is that the Nicaraguan word carries none of the coarseness that chocho has in Spain, where it is a blunt term for female genitals. Different country, different word.
How Natives Use It
Constantly, informally, and with no register anxiety: children say it, offices say it, and it fills the same slot the Caribbean fills with vaina and Chile with weá. The plural does the dismissive work — dejate de chochadas, “stop messing about”, puras chochadas, “complete rubbish” — and the singular does the pointing.
Common Pitfall
It is not an insult, but it is a judgement. Calling someone else’s project, worry or purchase una chochada says it does not matter, so keep it for your own missing objects until you know the company. And do not export the family: chochada is safely mild in Nicaragua and Honduras, while the root it resembles is genuinely rude in Spain — a word that is nursery-safe on one side of the Atlantic and not on the other.