MEXICO CITY — Daniel Navarrete greets friends with what seems an unlikely term of affection — he calls them “ox.”
Navarrete, a 19-year-old snack vendor, isn’t being rude. Go anywhere in Mexico City and you can hear someone calling someone else “guey,” which means “ox” or “slow-witted.”
The word, also spelled buey, once was an insult, but it has morphed over years of popular use to become Mexico’s version of “dude” or “bro.”
A guey (pronounced “way”) can be a spiky-haired boy, a stubbly chinned jitney driver, a college student with a ring in her nose.
Take a table near a bunch of Mexican teens, and it often sounds as if all other parts of speech were designed to transport you from one “guey” to the next. Even narco thugs have scrawled the word as an epithet in threatening banners, misspelling it wey.
“Everyone I talk to, it’s ‘guey,’ ‘guey,’ ‘guey,’ ” Navarrete said as he pulled a shift selling potato chips one recent afternoon with a friend named Edgar Martinez, who said he, too, uttered the term “all day.”
Mexico is a land so rich in slang and wordplay (much of it salty but freely used) that newcomers armed with book-learned Spanish might feel they had studied for the wrong test.
People who shout “aguas!” aren’t announcing the arrival of water; they are telling you to watch out. (It’s aimed a lot at chamacos, slang for “children.”)
People with lots of “lana,” or wool, aren’t fuzzy; they’re rich.
Some Mexicans worry about a proliferating usage of slang terms once considered too coarse for common use. They blame the looser talk on television and radio, as well as social changes that have given Mexican women equal access to colloquialisms, even raunchy ones.
“A narco, a rube and a yuppie all speak alike,” said commentator Guadalupe Loaeza, who said she has been shocked by the crude words that sometimes pepper the e-mail she receives. “There’s a laxity of language that I would say is almost offensive.
“We’ve gone too far to the other side.”
Some slang terms used in Mexico
• “No manches!” literally means “don’t make a stain,” but it is used to express incredulity, as in “get out.”
• “Quihubo!” is a greeting, another version of “what’s up?”
• The word “madre” for “mother” has many vulgar usages. But “padre,” or “father,” is often used to denote “cool.”
• To go on Facebook is “facebuquear.” Twitter devotees keep others posted by “tuiteando,” or tweeting.
• Someone in need of a new look might be told to “fotoshopeate,” or “Photo Shop yourself.”
