Every conflict should be resolved without resorting to physical violence. Anyone with a bit of good sense and civility will tell us that before hitting another you have to talk and try to understand each other. This is what the writer of this article thinks, and surely all those who are reading it; However, even though we are peaceful people who are on both sides of this screen, we know what punches, snoods and masks are and we have surely given a good blow to the printer that got stuck, or, going from the reality to desire, we would slap the interlocutor who calls in the middle of a nap or we would give a good slap to the people who speak in quotation marks with their fingers in the air.
Where did the words come from to hit us in Spanish? We will see here the two main sources that nurture that repertoire of names that we give to the blows that are given with the different parts of the body or with the most basic rigging.
Undoubtedly, the most common genesis for these words has consisted of naming blows from the body element that serves to do harm. The fists come from the fists , the elbows from the elbows , the slaps come from the hands and what covers them, the gloves, gives rise to the blows . Fighting by the hair comes fighting : a fight was a fight without weapons. Alongside these personal names is all domestic trousseau of a person who can be wielded in the melee: caning , estacazo , cudgel , leñazo, thwack (from truncheon ) ... are woodwinds with our ancestors beat.
In the same group was originally cate , which today is merely a slap, but which derives from the gypsy word for cane, caté (from Sanskrit kastha which meant wood); This is a relatively late word in our language, which does not extend until the end of the 19th century. Those who participated in a beating also fought with sticks , a word used in Spanish since the 17th century. Particular word also related to the body is somanta , normally used in the expression somanta de palos , made up of the preposition so (which is no longer used in Spanish but was previously used with the meaning of under: under penalty , under pretext ). The meaning seems to emanate from the terrible image of someone being covered in blows just like you put a blanket on.
The other great source of words to give names to the blows is the place to which we direct the movement: a slap is a blow to the neck; a soup was literally a blow to the double chin; one cheek was a slight bump (if it is rather strong slap ) that occurred on the cheeks or buttocks (named as smacking part of Andalusia and America) and a glassful da across the throat. Completely transparent are the face mask , a blow that closes and covers the other's mouth, as well as the moquete or punch given in the nose.
The idea that trunk is a possible way to name the nose, whack or punch was originally violent encounter noses between two people, although today both words have a broader meaning and, in the case of trompada a more American than Spanish extension. Very Andalusian is the chewed form (pronounced masca , with derivatives of the most varied: mascazo , mascales ... which more threatening) to give name to the blow that occurs in the jaw; comes from the verb mascar, derived from the Latin masticare .
Between what it hits and the area attacked is the air through which the hand travels. And there we have another word: slap . Bofar meant blowing its derivative Bofete derived slap , which is based on the idea that if you raise your hand with avieso order to give in the face of another, you will cause a movement similar air which, with another intensity, causes blew it. It is the same image that underlies the fact that in French slap is soufflet , from souffle (breath). The reverse position of the hand on the slap gives rise to the name, more elaborate than popular, backwards . Completely popular, however, is the gofetá form , with a passage from b to g (as in güeno , we explain it here) and loss of d between vowels.
They were not violent but they did beat professionally those who were involved in tanning and preparing hides: those were spanners and what they did was spank . The voice is of dark ethym (it is shared by Castilian with Portuguese and Basque) and from it derived the idea of punishing someone with blows or whipping. On the same basis is tunda from tundir .
In general, the voices of the hit are quite chaste and little imported, compared to the names of the instruments actually created to hit or shoot, where there are enough loans: from the Arabic we brought the word scourge , from the French arquebus , from the English rifle ...
Verbal violence has its ways and is embodied in insulting words or in abusive expressions. But, as we see, non-verbal violence, physical violence, is also concretized in words. I want to think that the duel with sticks that Francisco de Goya painted in his black paintings was preceded by a failed attempt at verbal conciliation. But of course, this was surely, in our entire history, the only positive consequence of a hit fight.
Zasca, a forceful cut
The word zas is included from the first dictionary of the Academy (in 1739) as a voice that imitated the knock of something, for example that of a door closing. Similar were the zis zas forms and the much more recent zasca . In general, these forms have been used to designate involuntary blows to things and, to a lesser extent, to name blows deliberately delivered by people. The interesting thing is that zasca has gone through a very recent process of change: from being considered an interjection with exclamatory use (and therefore similar to pum , bom and others of the style) in recent years it has begun to be used as a noun of male gender. A zasca is a forceful reply in the conversation, which leaves the interlocutor without arguments; its plural is zascas and it is common to use it within the phrase “zas (ca) in the whole mouth”. The phenomenon is so new that DRAE collected zasca as a noun in a recent addition, from 2019.
Such use of zasca is proper, by the way, of European Spanish but not American. The followers of the series Family Guy and Big Bang Theory know that the phrase 'poof in the whole mouth' is very frequent in the versions dubbed into Spanish of its episodes; In the case of Big Bang Theory , the original version puts in the mouth of the punctilious Sheldon Cooper an expression very different from the one used in Spanish translations: Bazinga!
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