Page 3 - abandonismo to abayuncar

abandono

I'm learning stuff here. Look: abandono de deberes is "dereliction of duty". I'd never thought about the word "dereliction" before, and now I'll think about it all day. Mr. Collins also translates abandono as "indulgence", then gives two examples: "she led a life of excess and indulgence" and "they live in utter degradation". What's it to be, Phil? Indulgence or degradation?

abanico

I'm learning stuff in English too. Abanico usually means "fan", but it can also mean a derrick, a kind of crane. Derrick gets its name from the surname of a well-known Tyburn hangman, and originally referred to the gallows. The Collins didn't tell me that, the Random House Webster's did. I went through an unhealthy phase in the early 2000s of collecting dictionaries and encyclopaedias. I stopped when I found Wikipedia and realised everything was pretty much in that. But the compulsion to buy reference works I don't need hasn't gone away. I can feel it in my bones. I'll be buying a fresh dictionary before the week is out. Possibly an etymological one. That's the kind of crazy mood I'm in.

abarcar

This is one I come across in translations and generally translate as cover, include or take in. But the first meaning the Collins gives is "to get one's arms around", which simultaneously sets off an image, in my mind at least, of a man hugging a tree and a fat woman.

Spanish is full of these words which we need several words to express in English, and vice-versa. There's no word in Spanish for "flick". There's no word in English for "to fall into a ditch or pit". That would be abarrancarse in Spanish.

abarque

A clutch of eggs, in the Andes. I don't know how to say a clutch of eggs in Buenos Aires, but I've got the Andean word. I'm going to go down the road to the Bolivian grocers and ask for "un abarque de huevos", just to see if they understand me. They're probably from the non-Andean part of Bolivia. Just my luck.

abarrotes, tienda de

We have a new word for grocery store. Yesterday it was abacería, today it's tienda de abarrotes. I bet there's one on every page. More importantly, I remembered a word I learnt yesterday! Minor celebration.

abatatado

Another Southern Cone word I've never heard of, but then neither has the Dictionary of the Royal Academy of Spanish, so I'm in exalted company. It means "coy" or "bashful". I wonder if it's derived from "batata", sweet potato. Sweet potatoes are very shy, in my experience. Not like their brash cousins, the yams.

Page 2 - abadengo to abandonar

Abadengo is one of my favourite Spanish words. It sounds like a fish, or a dingo that belongs to pop wizards ABBA. I want to put it in a song and rhyme it with "Rocío Marengo", the thinking man's Ingrid Grudke.

"You make me feel abadengo
Like a night with R. Marengo."

But abadengo merely means "pertaining to an abbott". That's no fun. I'm left with the rhyming couplet:

"You make me feel abadengo
Like a place where religious men go".

And that doesn't even make sense. Meanwhile, abadesa can mean either "abbess" or "brothel keeper". Having never met either, one begins to see the pointlessness of memorising such a large dictionary.

Plenty of other pointless words I've never heard of here, most notably abajera, which is a saddlecloth, and abajino, which is a northener. Both are marked (Cono Sur), meaning they're words from either Argentina or Chile. Or Paraguay or Uruguay. This "Southern Cone" denomination covers an area about twenty times the size of Britain. I don't even understand half the people in Britain.

I'm pleased to find a word I already knew, abalorio, meaning "glass bead". I knew this because my first wife once had a copy of Hermann Hesse's Juego del abolorio. I can't tell you what a glass bead does, but I can tell you that Hesse is pronounced "Hess-ay". An Argentine-Hungarian immigrant told me that, so it must be true.

Abandonar: Americans say "throw in the sponge" instead of "throw in the towel". That can't be right, Phil.

Page 1 A - abadejo

My first page of dictionary memorising is a dull one. Five sixths of it is taken up with explaining different uses of the word "a". This is Spanish for "to" (and "at" and "onto" and "I bet" and various other things) and should therefore be considered our first "false friend". Spanish for "a" is "uno", and that's way over at the end of page 991, which we'll be seeing some time in 2013.

In common with many dictionaries, the Collins has numerous helpful examples of language in use. Much of this is your standard "I'm going to the park", "it's next to the cinema" "when did you arrive in London?" textbook examples. But shortly into the second column, things take a more sinister bent:

in the dark,
she knocked him to the ground,
they stabbed him to death.
it tastes of cheese.

Clearly, there is more to the Collins English-Spanish 6th edition than meets the eye.

I get excited towards the end of the second column. Yes, excited. I think I've found a mistake, on the very first page of Mr. Collins' dictionary. It says "ha ido a por agua a la fuente" (she's gone to get water from the fountain). That first "a" before the "por" strikes me as extraneous. I check. It isn't. This project is already starting to feel extraneous.

That's "a" done. We move on to various acronyms. AA, or Aerolíneas Argentinas, shares an acronym with A.A., Alcoholics Anonymous. Having flown with Aerolíneas, I trust alcoholics take this as an insult.

Finally we get to a proper word: abacá. This is Spanish for abaca. I'm glad I had my dictionary for that. Another name for abaca is Manilla hemp. Manilla hemp has nothing to do with hemp in the sense of fibre cultivated from cannabis plants.

One of the things I like about Spanish is that one word can mean several different things, or nothing, dpending on where you are in the Spanish-speaking world. So it is with abadejo, which the Collins claims is a kind of codfish, ling or swordfish, but could also be a Spanish fly, a dried salted cod or a kinglet. A kinglet is a little bird, but also the king of birds, because it once won a race against all the other birds of the bird kingdom by hiding in the plumage of an eagle. Wikipedia suggests that abadejo is also the plants Echinops ritro and Stinking goosefoot. I've just learnt that there is a plant called the stinking goosefoot. My faith in the usefulness of this project is well and truly vindicated.

I also learnt the word abacero, who works in an abacería. This means grocer and grocery store, respectively. It comes from the Arabic ṣaḥb azzád, which means "the man with all the stuff".

Easy, Lover!

This blog tells the story of one man's attempts to read the Collins English-Spanish dictionary 6th edition from front to back. "Easy, Lover!" I hear you cry. But it's not that easy. There are 2113 pages in this dictionary. It's against all odds, and will probably take me six years.

Sadly, the blog names "Easy, Lover!" and "Against All Odds" were already taken. So this blog is called "No Dust Jacket Required." This is a joke name. "No Jacket Required" was an album by Phil Collins. My Collins English-Spanish dictionary has no dust jacket. It fell off during an arduous period of translation in 2006. The spine's come off too. I don't know if this says anything about Phil Collins.

The dictionary was in fact written by Colin Smith. Somewhere along the line, Colin got misspelt. Unless it's a different Colin in the title.

I've been speaking and learning Spanish since 1993, and still haven't learnt it all. I don't expect memorising a page a day to help me either, but at least it'll give me something to write about.