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| ¡Vete a bañar, cabrón! Photo credit: Eric Lewis licensed CC BY-SA 2.0 |
Sounds familiar? Countless moms have been found yelling out either this line or a variant on top of their voice at their little ones throughout history regardless of what language they speak. Let’s see why these sentences appear the way they do and learn some Spanish.
The nuts and bolts
Vete – Remember the Spanish for “to go”? Yes, ir. Ve is ir conjugated in the familiar imperative form. But what is this te doing there hanging on to ve? Well, Spanish grammar calls this a case of reflexive usage. While most of us know that te is “yourself” in Spanish, attaching it to any verb gives that verb an inherent object, “yourself”. So, while bañar simply means “to bathe”, bañarse means “to bathe oneself” or “to take bath”. The se gives that reflexive tone to the otherwise intransitive verb and it could be replaced by any reflexive suffix such as, me (myself), nos (ourselves), or te (yourself). So, while ir means “to go”, adding a se to it gives it the sense of leaving or, “to take oneself away”. Coming back to vete, it just means, by extension, “take yourself away” or just “leave”.
a bañar – Talk of the devil! wasn’t this word just mentioned in an example above? Well, that wasn’t intentional but it has indeed saved us some explaining here now that you already know what this word means! What about the a then? Loosely, it translates into “to” in English but, just loosely. Like you have already been warned before, never ever try to cram or even translate word-to-word because no such direct association exists between any two languages of the world, let alone Spanish and English. So, for a better relationship with your Spanish, respect a and take it for what is does to your sentence and what sense it gives rather than what English word it translates into. So the same question again: What is a doing here? Nothing actually. Same way as “to” does nothing in “I want to eat”. All it does is sit between vete and bañar and link the two.
You must use a whenever you use two words of action (in other words, verbs) in this sense, as in, voy a comer (I am going to eat). To make your life miserable, exceptions do exist but it can only get as bad as you allow it to. Don’t bother with exceptions at this stage. Don’t bother with any grammar. Just understand that you have to use a whenever another verb follows ir in any form. Learn this sentence well so that any absence of a between ir and any other verb automatically sounds unheard of, unnatural, and simply incorrect to you without you even knowing why! That would be awesome, wouldn’t it? By the way, some time back we posted an entire article dedicated to this word, Taking A Bath Or Taking A Shower.
cabrón – This one is an international favorite and will soon become yours too. If you are in Mexico, you hear this word more often than pauses in one’s breath. Why? Because it means “asshole”, that’s why. Told you, it would soon become your favorite too! And if swearing in Spanish motivates you, learn some of the choicest insults at Swearing In Spanish Like The Natives.
Now, before we move on, let’s string these pieces together and see how they work. Don’t bother much about the strange-looking upside-down bang. In Spanish, any sentence that closes with a bang (!), must also start with an upside-down bang (¡). That’s all there is to this alien punctuation mark. So, vete a bañar means, “go take a shower” and we all know what cabrón means. “Go take a shower, asshole!” Why? We will soon get to know the reason behind this anger in the next sentence.
Te apestan – Apestar is the Spanish for “to stink”. Here, we use apestar in its third-person present-tense plural form where the -r or any -ar verb is knocked off and replaced by -n (thus, cantar becomes cantan and trabajar becomes trabajan). Forget about the reflexive te (which is, in fact, an object pronoun and not a reflexive in this case) for a while. Remember Spanish often omits the subject if implied? So who or what is stinking here? Surely, it’s something plural, going by the conjugation of apestar. Let’s find out.
las bisagras – This is what we love about the Mexicans. To most who speak Spanish, a bisagra is a “hinge”. But in Mexico, it becomes a slang for “armpit”. Aren’t slangs wonderful? They are forbidden by the politically-correct teachers, books, and our elders but then how will Spanish taste so delicious if you take away all the spices? The a-ending must have told you that bisagra is feminine and should, thus, take la and not el. And since there’s more than one bisagra in question here, the la becomes las. So, this is the mystery subject.
What was stinking? Your armpits, of course! Well, but where does this sentence say it’s “your” armpits and not “mine”? Now, we will bring in the very first word of this sentence, the te. The object word, te (or me, or nos) must be used before the verb to indicate whose body-part we are talking about whenever the subject is a body-part. Also, in such cases, the subject often comes “after” the verb. Essentially, if we were to literally translate this sentence into English, it would turn out something like this: “The armpits stink to you.” Agreed this sounds illogical but who cares? Just learn the sentence without bothering about grammatical sense and soon you’ll know why they say, “me duele la cabeza,” when one has a headache.
Hope this line is going to be a part of your flashcard deck now so that you can soon start making many, many more sentences with a similar context and get fluent without learning grammar!
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