They Call It Mellow Hielo (Part II)

Casa, Cazar, Casar

Three words, one big confusion. I only learned “casa” - as in “house” - in my Spanish courses but I then realised that “cazar” is to hunt and “casar” (which sounds the same as cazar in Latin America) means to marry. To get over this three word conundrum I came up with a rather bizarre scene in my head where a maiden aunt goes out to hunt a bachelor to take home. I won’t say which family members or ex work colleagues appear in the mental sketch I made up but I am sure that you could come up with the characters from your own life anyway.

Sinatra’s Greatest Exits

When I started looking for CDs across here I noticed that a lot of them were called “grandes éxitos”. I guessed that this didn’t mean “big exits”, and my faithful dictionary confirmed that it was actually “greatest hits”, or something similar. That didn’t stop me thinking that the exit to a building was also an éxito, though. In my Spanish classes I had discovered that this is actually the “salida” but I still kept on making the same mistake. To try and sort things out I came up with one of my weird ideas. Frank Sinatra is walking towards the exit from the stage singing his greatest hits when he starts on the Spanish version of “My Way” and the English exit sign changes to “salida”. I have no idea how or why this worked for me but the word was never a problem for me again.