Lunfardo

Spanish dialect

Lunfardo is the name of a particular type of slang in fashion in the 1920's. It's widely used on tango lyrics, and there are even dictionaries of it. Many lunfardo words have crawled into the mainstream. The most known of these words in probably mina, which in standard Spanish means 'mine' (in both the senses it has in English). In lunfardo, mina means 'woman'. In modern Rioplatense, most people of ages below 40 use the word in informal talk, in this sense. It's not considered rude, just a bit uneducated. Teenagers and young people also use the common word tipo 'guy' as a male counterpart of mina, and so they never refer to men and women by hombres y mujeres, but as tipos y minas. Among friends of any sex, it's not even considered rude to speak of people who are listening as tipos or minas. The slight rudeness of the words is taken to be friendly familiarity. As for this, it's also common for some teenagers to address their friends with words like boludo, literally meaning 'bigballs'. (Surprisingly this is equally valid for teenage girls.)

As for addressing terms, teenage boys (and some ones outside their teens already) use a great variety of words to speak to or about other people or their friends: tipo ('guy'), vago ('lazy [one]'), pibe ('kid'), and even fiera ('wild animal'), and bestia ('beast'). There are also at least two addresing/nicknaming terms which refer to skin colour (negro 'black one' for dark-skin people; there are almost no black people in Argentina) and hair colour (colo, for colorado 'flaming red' for redheads, which are also not frequent). These two are usually non-derogatory if they come from the addressed person's acquaintances.

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