The Spanish we speak in Mexico is multifaceted and it is precisely the speakers who give a wide variety of meanings to a single word. The verb suck, according to the Dictionary of the Royal Academy of Language, means "attract, take out, suck the milk from the breasts with the lips and the tongue". But if you tell someone not to "suck" it means to stop exaggerating or someone very "sucked" is muscular. At the same time that someone "says pure blowjobs" can refer someone very liar.
Georgina Barraza Carbajal, PhD in linguistics and grammar from the Mexican Academy of Language, explains to Verne that the verb mamar is an example of a productive form of Spanish spoken in Mexico. "There are particularities that make them characteristic of a culture such as breastfeeding," he says by telephone. And its uses are so varied that they go from the innocent to the high-sounding. "Its use extends to the sexual realm and is given a meaning of oral sex," for example.
It is a verb that falls into the taboo, according to Verne Arturo Hernández Bravo, an academic at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at UNAM. "It is related to an intimate act that goes beyond feeding, since we speak of a part of the human woman, the breasts, which are taboo for society because they have been associated with sexual issues and that in general we do not usually use to speak of the subject ”, he says, via telephone.
But the use of the word does not stop there, since it is also associated with several high-sounding expressions. According to Guido Gómez de Silva's Short Dictionary of Mexicanisms, a "sucker" is not only a suckling or nursing subject, but it is a vulgar adjective to designate someone unfriendly. "A spouse from his mother, a guy who falls for that," says Hernández Bravo. "Or the 'blowjob' is a guy who has exaggerated his muscles a lot," he says.
And in fact, saying "no mames" or "te mamaste" may seem very rude, but it is not a peculiarity of the language in Mexico. "The altisonancia or the use of rude words is not exclusive to Mexican Spanish, but the choice of words varies," says Barraza. "While here a bad word may be suck, in Spain the word 'culo' is used a lot, which in Mexico is very vulgar," says the grammar. To attenuate the sound of this word, Mexicans can make use of other phonetic resources such as "no manches" to soften the "no mames" or "okay mama dolores" to avoid saying the word "mamado".
For language scholars, use of the verb mamar and its variants has become widespread due to the use of social networks and, of course, of memes. "Networks end up equaling us to users, that's why we use words that are part of other generations, especially young people," he says.
The truth is that the more we use a word, the more it defines our culture. "If you say 'what a sucker' instead of 'how unfriendly' it is because you want to give strength to your phrase," says Hernández. "On the use we give to words like this, cultural studies can be done, not just linguistic studies," says Barraza. The truth is that this verb has left us many "blowjobs" or jokes that we can share to the point of exhaustion.
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