In case you aren’t familiar with the expression, a “busman’s holiday” is a vacation that closely mirrors a tourist’s everyday life. A “busman” (normally one would say “bus driver”) spends a lot of time on the road, so a vacation that involves a fair amount of travel would be more of the same.

Because I’m obsessed with Spanish, my recent trip to Argentina was very much a busman’s holiday. For one thing, during the trip I spoke very little English: only in phone calls home, and with Spanish speakers who wanted to practice their English. My travel buddy Susan and I spoke only Spanish with each other, and I had as many conversations as I could with Argentinians and other Spanish speakers. As a result, my Spanish improved perceptibly during the trip. Immersion works!

My most memorable such conversation took place at the Puerto Iguazú airport, on our way back from seeing the waterfalls. While waiting for our flight I met a Paraguayan civil engineer who was working on a new highway that would bring drivers to the new bridge to Brazil just north of Hito Tres Fronteras (pictured in my previous post). She said something along the lines that “once the bridge and highway are completed, there will be no more traffic.” For a New Yorker raised with the ghost of Robert Moses, the famed builder who never met a stretch of concrete he didn’t like, this was an extreme provocation. One theme of Robert Caro’s classic memoir The Power Builder is that the more roads and bridges Moses built, with the purported aim of decreasing traffic, the worse traffic got. My new friend had never heard of Robert Moses, so this was an exciting conversation for both of us. The Power Broker is now on her English reading list.

Besides the sheer joy of speaking Spanish, the other “busman’s holiday” aspect of my trip was relishing the dialectal features of Argentinian Spanish. As a warmup I devoted some of my free time before the trip to Argentinian fiction. I reread Guillermo Martínez’s La muerte lenta de Luciana B. (2008), which I had found an easy-to-read page-turner years ago. While it was still exciting the second time around, Martínez’s treatment of the title character now struck me as somewhat outdated and sexist. I also read Mariana Enriquez’s truly weird but wonderful novel Nuestra parte de noche (2021), about a sort-of-Satanic cult operating in exactly those parts of Argentina that we were about to visit, namely Buenos Aires and Corrientes province, including Iguazú. During our trip I reread Eduardo Sacheri’s La pregunta de sus ojos (2003), the novel that inspired the 2009 Argentinian movie El secreto de sus ojos and its 2015 English-language adaptation Secret in their eyes. I’ve seen both movies, and the novel is better.

These books reminded me of Argentinian vocabulary like remera for T-shirt and biro (or birome) for a pen. La pregunta de sus ojos in particular featured a near-constant stream of descriptors like boludo ‘imbecile’ and pibe ‘kid.’ Once I arrived in Argentina, local vocabulary was all around me. For example, while texting with our airbnb hostess during my short wait for Susan at the airport I learned to use departamento instead of apartamento and tránsito instead of tráfico.

By the way, these words exemplify a variety of well-known mechanisms of semantic change. Remera is an example of ‘broadening,’ since it originally referred to a shirt worn by a rower (remar means ‘to row’). Biro(me) is an ‘eponym’ that memorializes Ladislao José Biro, the Hungarian-Argentine inventor of the ballpoint pen. Boludo, like English ‘blockhead’, is a metaphorical extension from a shape (bola ’round’) to a personality trait, while pibe was borrowed from Catalan pevet, Portuguese pivete, or Italian pivetto.

As a further “by the way,” Corominas traces the history of pibe from peu (the Catalan word for ‘foot’) to a footed incense holder, to odorous incense, to something with a strong smell, to an infant, to a child. This is as wacky as the evolution of muñeca from ‘milestone’ to either ‘wrist’ or ‘doll,’ yet every step is plausible.

As for as the Argentinian accent, its most salient aspect is probably the lilting intonation that the language has absorbed from Italian (listen at 4:25 here). When I overhear this intonation in the speech of tourists in New York I’m often emboldened me to ask, with a fair rate of success, ¿Son ustedes de Argentina? I didn’t try to adopt this intonation on my trip, but did have fun replacing the usual Spanish glide in words like yo and calle with a harder /dʒ/ or just /ʒ/ consonant, as in ‘Joe’ or ‘pleasure,’ respectively. This is the feature that gave the Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto Guevara the nickname ‘Che.’

My next post will discuss the outstanding feature of Argentinian grammar: voseo.