ESL Vocabulary and Idioms

Re: salao

CalifJim — Wed, 14 May 2008 00:41:27 GMT

Pucca
I've just looked for "salado" in my dictionary and it says:

5 MÃX [persona] Que es vÃctima de un maleficio - In Mexican, someone who is victim of a curse.

From wordreference.com

salar

I	verbo transitivo 1 (echar sal a una comida) to add salt to 2 (poner en salazÃ³n) to salt 3 LAm fam (estropear, desgraciar) to spoil, ruin 4 LAm (dar o causar mala suerte) to bring bad luck to

Re: salao

Anonymous — Wed, 14 May 2008 00:23:09 GMT

it holds a slang meaning, much like going "postal" does in the U.S. - workers bring guns to work and kill people, and it just so happens to occur at post offices more frequently than other industries (or at least at one time it did)

salao is a tiny fishing island that rarely has good news to speak of. therefore, going/being salao is to be unlucky in fishing in this context.

- db

Re: salao

Pucca — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 02:45:35 GMT

I wonder why "salao" isn't translated. If I hadn't read the link Clive gave, I would have imagined that the word could mean "crazy". "

I've been googling the text in other languages and in Spanish and Basque, that world still remains as "salao".

..I've just looked for "salado" in my dictionary and it says:

5 MÃX [persona] Que es vÃctima de un maleficio - In Mexican, someone who is victim of a curse.

Re: salao

Clive — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 00:18:21 GMT

Hi,

It seems to be very much a slang term in Spanish.

Have a look at the discussion at http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=416012

It seems to be a bit of a puzzle, even for Spanish speakers, as they offer different comments.

There is a suggestion that it is derived from the word 'salado', but even that doesn't really answer the question.

Clive

Re: salao

Marius Hancu — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 17:01:35 GMT

Spanish, I'd guess ...

Re: salao

Anonymous — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 15:28:19 GMT

Perhaps Spanish?

salao

Espeland — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 15:15:50 GMT

Hello everybody !

I wonder where the word "salao" comes from. It seems to mean "very unlucky" and appears right at the beginning of Ernest Hemingway's "The old man and the sea" :

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, [...]

In Portugese "salÃ£o" means "saloon" but that can't be the origine, can it ?