El corillo en la playa
Saturday at Piñones: traffic on the twenty-six, alcapurrias at the kiosks, a coconut limber, music too loud to talk over, and one friend who has been blanking everybody for three days and turns up at five with no explanation.
Reinforces vocabulary from Puerto Rican Spanish: A Survival Guide.
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The Scene
A Saturday at Piñones runs through the working half of Puerto Rican Spanish: corillo, tapón, chacho, al garete, wepa, pichear, bregar, janguear, chavos, limber, brutal, chinchorrear, zafacón and china — plus an uninverted question and a great deal of English wearing full Spanish conjugation. Notice that bregar turns up in three separate lines and explains nothing in any of them.
Vocabulary Highlights
- el corillo — your crew: corillo, the fixed group you go everywhere with.
- ¡wepa! — the shout of joy and arrival: wepa.
- bregar — to deal with, handle, cope, sort out, hustle through: bregar. The deep one.
- janguear — to hang out: janguear, from English, fully conjugated.
- pichear — to blank somebody: pichear, from baseball.
- chacho — man, blimey, well: chacho.
- al garete — adrift, out of hand: al garete.
- los chavos — money: chavos, older than the dollar it counts.
- el tapón / el zafacón / la china — the traffic jam, the bin and the orange. Three everyday nouns that stop at the island’s shore.
- brutal — brilliant. And chinchorrear, the Saturday it describes.
Read the Puerto Rican Spanish survival guide for the sounds and the grammar behind all of this, or the Puerto Rico hub for the island’s full linguistic map.
This scene only scratches the surface — the full chapter is in Daily Life and Culture, part of our Speak Spanish Like a Native book series.