"Richard Periut" > wrote in message
...
> Foxy Lady wrote:
> > "Richard Periut" > wrote in message
> > ...
> >
> Sandra,
>
> You got it a bit confused.
>
> You don't ask a Cuban for a papaya because of what it resembles; you ask
> for "fruta bomba" and to Dominicans you ask for a "lechosa"
>
> Cubans call an insect a "bicho" PR's use it for the meaning of; well you
> know.
>
> You don't say "bollo" when you want bread in a Cuban bakery, you say
> "flauta de pan,".
>
> Bolsa is for Dominicans, what "bicho" is for PR's. And for Cubans, it is
> actually a real word: a long rod that the chinese use for carrying
> buckets on their necks ( a pinga.)
>
> For Cubans, bolsa, funda, cartucho all mean the same, and are not
> offensive.
>
> I don't mean to sound like a pervert, it's just that I want our non
> spanish speaking people here to understand the meanings : )
>
> Regards,
>
> Richard

One of my bosses in PR is Cuban, and there is a large community of both
Cubas and Dominicans in PR... Mr Sosa would constantly try to correct his
employees (and customers!) when selling/buying cement, or asking for a
shopping bag, etc. I can hear him now, "No se dice bolsa, se dice FUNDA"...
and the Cubans I went to school with were the same... I have no idea why
there would be a difference in how they speak "Cuban" in PR...

As for Dominicans, my personal experience with them is from visiting
relatives of a neighbor (from PR) who live in Santo Domingo and having a
Neo-Rican-Minican compadre, all of whom were horrified when I asked for
pegao and kept insisting that I say "con-con" because they didn't want
anyone to overhear me asking for sex... and I'm not even going to get into
what happened when one of them asked me out!!! LOL!!!

I didn't want to get into the papaya/lechosa thing because I thought it too
much, but I guess it's ok because it's food related <smile>... as far as
bicho is concerned, I believe PR is the only place where it doesn't mean
insect, but pinga means the same thing as bicho in PR...

And if we start with the different words used by our South and Central
American friends, we'd have to create a new newsgroup to discuss them
because there are so many of them!

Spanish may be a very simple language as far as pronunciation, but it's so
rich in the various ways people use the same words that we could be talking
for hours on end about it.

Regards,

Sandra