I’ve nearly finished Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. About halfway through it, a Mexican houseboy in California called Marlowe “Hijo de la flauta.” Marlowe left, “wondering how an expression meaning ‘son of a flute’ had come to be an insult in Spanish.” I wonder, too.
My Spanish-language limitations are firmly established. I can order a beer and a platter of bicycle tires, and I can ask directions to the little typewriters’ room, but that’s about it. I’m hoping one of you kind folks can tell me why I shouldn’t call anyone a son of a flute. By the way, I did a google search first. I read about a dozen sites before I got accidentally trapped in a series of pop-up porn sites.
<—Not Hispanic, has nothing to contribute other than to say that 80% of the Spanish phrases he knows are completely different and odd when literally translated into English.
Just reading Chandler now. And felt the need to check.
My first thought was that son of a flute would be a piccolo.
And that if a flute was a dick then a piccolo would be a pencil dick.
According the urban dictionary piccolo actually is South American slang for male parts so I guess the insult is either that you are calling someone a dick OR a pencil dick.
