El man / la man
"That guy" — an English noun wearing Spanish grammar, and one of the few Spanish words whose gender lives entirely in the article.
Related lesson: Ecuadorian Spanish: A Survival Guide.
Hear it in context
El man me dijo que el local abre a las nueve.
The guy told me the place opens at nine.
La man que atiende en la tienda es súper amable.
The woman who works in the shop is really nice.
Los manes ya se fueron, quedamos las manes nomás.
The guys have already left — it's just us women now.
What It Actually Means
El man is “the bloke”, “that guy” — a way of referring to a person you have not introduced and are not going to. It is neutral by default: not affectionate like ñaño, not rude, just efficient. It also does duty for a boyfriend or a person of interest — el man de la Andrea is Andrea’s fella — and in the right tone it can be faintly dismissive, exactly as English “the guy” can.
Where It Comes From
From English man, borrowed whole and then handed over to Spanish morphology. What Spanish did to it is the interesting part. The noun refuses to inflect — there is no *mana — so gender was outsourced to the article: el man is a man, la man is a woman, and the plurals los manes / las manes take the ordinary Spanish -es that consonant-final nouns take. The result is a word that is English in the mouth and completely Spanish in the grammar. Ecuador shares it with Colombia, where el man and la man work identically; the two countries trade slang across the border constantly, as chévere also shows.
How Natives Use It
Everywhere below the level of a formal introduction, and especially in narration: half the anecdotes told in Quito or Guayaquil have an unnamed man in them. It pairs naturally with the other Ecuadorian conversational furniture — de ley que el man llega chumado — and it is emphatically informal-spoken, not written.
Common Pitfall
The one thing learners get wrong is la man, which sounds so wrong to a Spanish ear that many foreigners “correct” it to la mana and instantly out themselves. It is la man. Beyond that: keep it out of anything formal, and be aware that in a hostile tone el man (“this guy here”) is a way of talking about someone in front of them without using their name — a small insult in most rooms.