August 28, 2007

Fijese que...

Two very used words exist for us the Guatemalans that are famous for their hidden meaning… the very famous ones "fíjese que… " . I couldn’t really explain their meaning in English but the literal translation is “notice that…”

We very frequently use these words but it was not until a foreign friend made me think about the way we use them (most of times), that I realized the significance of those words in our country. My friend told me "Every time that a Guatemalan begins a sentence with "fijese que…” I already know what follows is an excuse or a justification.

Many times, we use those words in that way: "fijese que... I could not finish the work because… ", "fijese que... that it will be ready until next week because… ", "fijese que... I won't be able to get there because… "

In conclusion, those words are part of our idiosyncrasy because are so useful nowadays… for good or bad; and who knows if we will end up putting them away with so many others now considered archaic.
And fíjese que... my post finishes here because there was an outage…

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi, I was researching a wizard-like normal man from Latvian, who moved to Florida and built a castle using levitation. After his death, he left behind a paper saying the secret to the universe was 7129/6105195 ...Just trying to do my own playing around I used the English alphabet to code that into letters, and I got the words gli fjese. Gli means the in one language, and fjese is close to fijese in another language. Still just playing around seeing if I can figure out what it means.

Unknown said...

Oh, the mans name was edward leedskalnin if you want to look up about his story and coral castle