One of my SO’s favorite phrases is “ay co machingas,” which is pronounced pretty much exactly like I spelled it: “ay” as in Ricky Ricardo’s “ay ay ay!”, “co” as in “corporation”, and “machingas” as in… um… kind of like you’d say “machine gun”. I’m hearing impaired, so I can’t be much more help than that, I apologize.
He’s half-Mexican, he uses it as an expression of playful frustration, like “what did you do now?!” or even, well, Ricky Ricardo’s “ay ay ay!” utterances. It’s often accompanied with an eyeroll. Neither he nor his Mexican mom know much Spanish, and they don’t know where he managed to pick it up.
I was wondering if anybody else has any idea what I’m talking about or if I have the spelling right at all. About all I can find off Google is that a machinga is a petty trader in Tanzania.
Yeah, that’s it. Chingar is colloquial Mexican for “'to fuck.” (Most other places joder is more common.) Chingas is second personal familiar, so literally “How you [do] fuck!” Figuratively, more like “Don’t fuck around.”
Back in high school, we had an exchange student in class. One of the first things us students did was teach her how to swear in English, and she taught us how to swear in Spanish
Aside from chingar, I remember that “caga” means shit or crap.
This was covered in the book A Handbook of Good Manners for Little Girls, by Pierre Louys Zebra.
(Not work safe)
If your teacher asks you to conjugate some verb of your
choice, there’s no point in choosing “to fuck”:
I fuck,
you fuck,
he, she or it fucks,
we fuck,
you fuck,
they fuck;
I fucked,
I have fucked,
I will fuck,
I would fuck,
you fucked,
you have fucked,
you will fuck,
you would fuck,
etc…
However interesting the conjugation of this verb, you’ll doubtless
be scolded for knowing it, rather than not knowing it.
As has been said, como literally means how. As most of us know, mucho means much or a lot. I teach everyone that I possibly can that “Como mucho” means “how much.”
The example given is an interesting comparison of English and Spanish. “Como chingas” could be said in English something like “My, how you fuck me” in the sense of a fucking-over. “How nice!” or “What a lovely baby!” are other parallels with Spanish, where’d you say “Que bonito” or “Que lindo bebe!” You see that we use “how” with adjectives and “what” with nouns, whereis in Spanish it’s always “what” with adjective or nouns, and “how” with verbs. In English, we don’t really use anything with verbs other than my particular translation, which seems rather old and archaic in today’s English. I think that if I used that word, I’d tend to say, “Dude/man/bitch, you fucked me over.” Yeah, even to my wife. If I talked like that.
Now I’m going off on a tangent, but translating in general is super hard, even if you do know both languages.
OK, my suggestion of “don’t fuck around” was perhaps not quite on the nose. However, the way it’s conjugated implies that is something the other person has done that has caused the annoyance, so “what the fuck” isn’t right either. As CBEscapee indicates, the real sense is perhaps more like “How you annoy me!”, though expressed more profanely.
