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.