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DISPATCHES
posted 8/20/1999
This is the first of two sets of etymologies that Nerve will publish from Paul West. He is compiling these and other words for a forthcoming book, entitled The Secret Life of Words: A Fanatic's Album. The second set will be published in April 2000.
Piropo
How do we manage without this? An extravagant fulsome street compliment uttered in Latin America, mostly by male to female, it approximates a stroke of verbal lightning that persuades the reluctant recipient to hear further overtures. Perhaps. The piropo is a bit surreptitious, best done in a stage whisper, almost certainly by a benign stalker, and much more literary in its primitive way than the hardhat whistle from a high girder, emitted by someone to whom all blond girls are Helga. For example, a piropo might go like this: "Señora, your bosom is a hot pudding that would melt the indifference of a million men and incinerate the chastity of a hundred-year-old monk." Actually, the word itself, no kidding, is a stunner, more seductive to a word-lover than any piropo. It combines fire from Greek pur with oops for eye. The Greek piropos means fiery, golden garnet, worth whispering in its own right: the sound of fire, able perhaps to melt pillars of cosmic salt.
Those with the leisure and inclination to collect piropos, perhaps against a pre-emptive strike by woman akin to the one in Aristophanes's Lysistrata, can do worse than consult Professor Alan Dundes's Parsing Through Customs, essays on folklore from a psychoanalytic point of view, best of all "The Piropo and the Dual Image of Women in the Spanish-Speaking World" (with Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco). We learn from Pitt-Rivers, the anthropologist for whom an Oxford University museum was named, that the word piropo means "ruby" and hopes to have an equally pleasing effect, at least in Andalusia, while Gómez Tabanera says a piropo is like a flaming dart a man throws in a spasm. Piropeadores, as such throwers are called, are not always polite or flattering: their inflamed lust has a component of shame and loathing and their piropos may express a collectively held male fantasy about women. A note from the sixteenth century says, "Beautiful women suffer from the fact that they cannot set foot in the streets without hearing thousands of low words and dishonest signs from thousands of low people, which must sadden and sicken them, if they are virtuous." Now as then, of course. On the other hand, Alan Dundes observes that "in Latin America, women often feel that visiting North American men are inattentive, cold, or unable to praise a woman's beauty, since U.S. men are unfamiliar with the piropo tradition."
Some piropos are rather obvious and callow: "Don't get too close to me, I don't have fire insurance," although sometimes embellished with distracting allusion: "Beauty? Michelangelo next to your father is nothing, because I am sure he never in his life made a sculpture as perfect as you." Bolder spirits get less candied and more candid: "I would really like to be the tile you step on so I could see your thing." Such imagery is hardly the prelude to an approach by either, exacting from the female retorts such as sinverguenza (shameless), atrevido (bold), or insolente (insolent). The following Chaucerian accost comes from Cuba and has to do with pubic hair: "Why don't you show me Fidel's?" This one hails from Buenos Aires: "Don't you want to be the mustard for my hot dog?" Those who go farther afield call "Como te romperia el culo!" — at least in Buenos Aires they do ("Let me fuck you in the ass"). Some get into biting ("morderte la conchita") and many attempt degradation, punning on such a word as culo, that means both buttocks and "ugly woman."
Many piropos uttered by men in a group never reach the women, but the men laugh at the lewd insult, thus reinforcing their so-called manliness. Latin-American women feel ambivalent about the piropo, themselves caught between the cult of virginity and chastity and the male hunger for harlots. Such stresses on both sexes are not unique, but they are more on the surface in Latin America, if only you can overhear the piropos.
