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cábala [f] [from Hebrew qabbalah 'tradition', the study and interpretation of the religious Jewish texts using hermetic techniques, and the mystic philosophy supporting them] a token of luck, a ritual action that must be performed or a thing that must be carried or worn to bring good luck to a person or group. Especially used of some gestures in football matches (where, for example, some players might cross themselves on entering the field), but also referring to things like wearing red ‘to avoid the evil eye from envy’ when going to a special party, or even calling a particular person on the phone before a test. The cábala is a thing to be repeated each time; this traditional repetition is what makes it a cábala and not a single meaningless gesture.

cacho [m] a bit, a small amount (esp. of time); a small portion of solid matter (esp. food). Usually in the singular, un cacho. Also [fixed phrase] cacho de (used for big great things or people in different contexts), for example: ¡Lindo cacho de auto tenés! ‘Some nice car you have!’, Es un cacho de doctor ‘He’s a hell of a doctor’.

cadáver [m] lit. corpse, dead body; an empty bottle, esp. of an alcoholic drink, and esp. when in a group of similarly empty and accumulating bottles.

caer [vi] or caerse [ps-ref vi] (lit. ‘to fall’) to drop by (someone’s): ¿A qué hora caigo? ‘What time should I drop by?’, Nos caímos todos y le hicimos una fiesta sorpresa ‘We dropped by all together and gave him a surprise party’.

cagar [v] [rude]: 1 [i] lit. to shit; 2 [t] to disappoint, fail to comply on, do something against the interests of (people), ruin, destroy or damage (a machine) as in Nos cagaste la fiesta ‘You ruined (us) the party’; 3 [i] to die (esp. figuratively), to stop functioning, to be ruined, as in Cagó la impresora ‘The printer’s dead’ (see finiquitar); 4 cagarse [ps-ref] lit. to shit on oneself; to be a coward; to chicken out; 5 [fixed phrase] cagar a palos to beat severely; to talk very badly of; to treat someone with physical violence (more or less like ‘to take the shit out of’); 6 [fixed phrase] cagar a pedos to chastise, to punish verbally, to give a dressing-down (Mi viejo me cagó a pedos porque llegué a las 8 de la mañana ‘My old man gave me hell because I got back home at 8 a.m.’); 7 [fixed phrase] irse a cagar to go to hell, to fuck off (usually imperative, using the suppletive verb andar).

cajeta [f] [taboo] vagina, woman’s genitals. Curiously, this same word refers to a kind of dulce de leche in Mexico. Nothing to do with the old-fashioned term cajetilla.

calzado/a [adj] lit. having footwear on; armed, carrying a weapon, esp. a gun.

cama [f] lit. bed; a scam, a trap, an act of deception; the act of framing someone; (in card games) to play badly or as if one’s cards were bad, so as to mislead the opponent into a worse position in the end (hacer la cama). Also dim. camita.

capo/a [m, f, adj] [Italian, lit. 'head'] 1 (esp. with the definite articles) boss, chief, leader; [derogatory] the leader of an organization seen as a dark high figure (capomafia ‘mob leader’); 2 (being) a good person, a person one likes, esp. for being supportive and charming (cf ‘tops’).

cana 1 [f] (generally in singular definite form, la cana) the police force, as a whole; a group of policemen. See also yuta. 2 [m, f] a policeman or policewoman.

canalla [m/f, adj] a fan of the Rosario Central football club.

canchero/a [adj, m/f] 1 cool, hip, colourful; 2 easy-going, friendly (see macanudo); 3 (with a complement) experienced, skilled, good (at), able to work (at something) without mental effort, esp. because of being accustomed to do a task: Con esta máquina estoy canchero ‘I totally get this machine’; 4 (esp. in the phrase hacerse el canchero, “play cool”) too friendly, bothersome, overconfident, daring, taking too many liberties: No te hagás el canchero con mi hermana ‘Don’t be so friendly with my sister’; also cancherear [v]. Etymology: from cancha ‘court, sports field’ (probably soccer).

canuto/a [m/f, adj] (a person) cheap, unwilling to spend money. The standard term for this is tacaño, but the non-slang colloquial term commonly in use in Argentina is amarrete.

caño [m] (lit. ‘a water pipe, a tube’) a marijuana cigarette , esp. in the fixed phrase fumarse un caño ‘to smoke a joint’; [fixed phrase] dar con un caño lit. ‘to hit with a pipe’; to heavily criticize, to speak very badly of (esp. loudly and openly, in public).

careta [m, f, adj] [derog] lit. ‘mask, face covering’; a snobbish person, esp. upper-classy, affected or pedantic, going always to expensive fashionable places, always dressing fashionable clothes; a person who lives by fashion and image. Also found as the augmentative caretón or the diminutive (despective) caretita.

carrito [m] lit. a diminutive of carro (in this meaning, ‘moving kiosk’); a certain kind of restaurant, esp. one with open spaces and rather informal; a moving post with a portable gas supply and cooker, where fast foods are sold (the equivalent of hot dogs and hamburguers).

chabomba [f] [uneducated] syllable inversion of bombacha ‘woman’s underwear’.

chabón [m] a guy, a man (esp. a silly one — the word carries some indefinite derogatory sense).

chapas [f, pl] the hairs on one’s head; volársele las chapas (a uno) lit. ‘to get one’s [hair] blown away’, to lose hair, to become bald.

chanchuyo [m] [old-fashioned but still in use] an act of corruption, an illicit agreement; dirty business; political maneuvers done in the dark. Etymology: probably a reference to chancho ‘pig’ and the idea of chanchada ‘pig-like, dirty, filthy thing’.

changa [f] an informal job, for a limited (sometimes undefined) period of time, without any legally binding contract; a temporal job, for example, small-scale house repairs not needing an architect.

chanta [m, f] [derogatory]: a deceiver, a cheater, a swindler, someone known to perform dishonest practices. Derivatives chantún/a [m, f], and chantada [f] the act of such a person.

chau [interj] ‘bye!’, ‘goodbye!’. This word is a rendering of Italian ciao, ultimately from [io sono il] tuo sciavo ‘[I am] your slave’, an old goodbye greeting (cf. English ‘At your service’). A native speaker and fellow conlanger, Luca Mangiat, tells me that in some dialects medial -v- consistenly disappears, which accounts even more for this etymology. This word has spread over the world with its original sound /tʃao/, chao, but this is extremely rare and rather snobbish-sounding in Argentina.

che [interj] [vocative] ‘hey!’, ‘hey, you!’. Etymology unknown. This word appears in Mapudungu (a language spoken by the Mapuche, natives from Southern Argentina and Chile) meaning ‘people’, and in Guaraní (natives of the Paraná River basin) where it means ‘I’.

chiquitas [f, pl] [fixed phrase] no andarse con chiquitas go for the big thing; not bother with small nuances.

choro/a [m, f] a thief, a robber. Derived verb chorear ‘to steal’. Alternative form, gaining acceptance: chorro.

chota [f] 1 a general object of despise; [fixed phrase] no importar una chota ‘not to give a damn’; 2 [rude, becoming rare] penis (or vagina, obviously depending on the sex of the person spoken of). Used interchangeably with the masculine form choto (I don’t know which is more frequent).

choto/a [m, f, adj] of poor quality, not well made (used with ser ‘to be’, of movies, plays, houses, etc.); in bad condition, insufficient (used with estar ‘to be in a state’, of machines, houses, etc.). Often prefixed with the augmentative re-. Example: La película era re-chota ‘The movie was so very bad’. Verbal derivatives chotear ‘to make or cause to be in bad condition’, chotearse [ps-ref] ‘to go wrong, to go bad’ (esp. machinery). For example Se me choteó el teclado ‘My keyboard is screwed up’.

chupamedias [m, f, adj] [derogatory] lit. ’sock-sucker’, boot-licker. Tends to lose the final -s.

chupar [v] to drink (said of alcoholic drinks, esp. when too much). Lit. to suck (only this sense is always transitive). Derivative chupero/a [m, f] ‘alcoholic person’.

chupina [f] the act of missing a school day without the knowledge of one’s parents; going out as if heading for school and take a turn somewhere in the way, or getting to school and then deciding not to enter. In the fixed expression Hacerse la chupina. See also rata.

ciruja [m] informal recycler; a person who picks up selected pieces of garbage in the streets, takes them with him and re-sells them, including glass bottles, metal, and paper. Sometimes this bounty is loaded on precarious two-wheeled horse-powered carriages. These can be seen going down the largest and most luxurious avenues in all big cities in Argentina. The activity is called cirujeo; the verb is cirujear. Nothing to do with cirugía ’surgery’.

cloro [m] lit. chlorine (the element Cl); [countable] a piss, in the phrase echarse un cloro [uneducated, male speech] ‘to take a piss’.

colgarse [ps-ref vi] lit. ‘to hang oneself’; 1 to forget an appointment, to forget returning calls, to forget the cellphone is off, to (usu. unintentionally) stay away from familiar places, etc., for one day or more; if done as a habit, ser un colgado; 2 (of a computer) to hang, to freeze, to stop due to a fatal error (same as tildarse). Example: Habíamos quedado en juntarnos a comer, pero se colgó y no apareció ‘We had agreed to meet for lunch but s/he… and didn’t show up.’

combustible [m] lit. fuel; alcohol, an intake of an alcoholic drink, thought of having a reanimating or cheering-up effect.

comegatos [m/f, number invariable] [derogatory] lit. ‘cat-eater’; a person from the city of Rosario. The origin of this word was a 1996 sensationalist TV news piece, broadcasted from Rosario to Buenos Aires and the rest of the country, in which poor residents of a shanty town in Rosario admitted they had to hunt stray cats to eat, and even showed felines being roasted on a grill. It later turned out the whole thing had been staged for political purposes. According to Julio Bazán, who reported the news, the media from Buenos Aires bought the story because the alleged cat eating was initially brought to light by Jorge Lanata, a respected, supposedly independent critical journalist.

comer [vt] lit. to eat (common usage, not slang); in other cases generally used as comerse [ps-ref vt]; 1 to accept an unpleasant experience without complaint and/or repressing outer manifestations of unpleasantness, to endure, to “suck it up”, especially when one has no chance: Me tuve que comer el reto sin contestar para no botonearte ‘I had to stand the reprimand in silence to avoid telling on you’; 2 [rude] in pseudo-reflexive form and with a feminine gender pronominal direct object (comérsela), it refers to fellatio and male homosexuality in general: Me parece que tu amigo se la come ‘I think your friend is gay’; 3 comerla [rude] to be defeated, to end badly, to die literally or figuratively (related to the previous meaning,  with the connotation of an unpleasant or forced sexual experience).

concheto/a [m, f, adj] [derogatory] an older form of careta.

copado/a [m, f, adj] [appreciative, becoming old-fashioned] cool, a good thing, a nice thing or person (see macanudo). Especially applied to people, places and occasions like parties.

corralito [m] [new word (first attested November 2001)] lit. ‘little corral, small pen, little enclosed space’, the set of financial restrictions implemented by minister Domingo Cavallo of the De la Rúa administration to prevent growing amounts of money to be withdrawn from bank accounts, by decreeing that people will have to get their salaries by check only, imposing weekly and monthly limits on the amount of money in banks allowed for withdrawal (initially 250 pesos a week, 1000 pesos a month), and completely freezing some types of bank accounts, thus leaving people’s savings trapped for an indefinite time. These measures were intended to keep the bank system from collapsing and avoid foreign currency (dollars) to leave the country, but were soon breached, and they deepened an already monstrous recession. (The government fell a month later.) — Lessened restrictions implemented later received the name corralón (’big pen’).

cosa [f] lit. ‘thing, object’; darle cosa (a uno) [fixed phrase, transitive] to feel slight disgust or apprehension while doing a certain thing: Me da cosa comer pulpo ‘… eating octopus’.

creer [v] used as pseudo-reflexive with an object, e.g. creérsela: to believe oneself or pretend to be important, capable, cool, handsome/pretty, etc.; to be self-conceited. Often with the augmentative prefix re- and/or in the participial/adjectival form creído/a: Esa pendeja se la re-cree or Esa pendeja es re-creída “That [broad] thinks she’s so cool”.

crepar [vi] to die, to pass away.

cuete [m] mispronunciation of cohete ‘rocket’, also slang for ‘fart’; al cuete = al pedo.

cuero [m] leather, animal skin; [fixed phrase] sacar el cuero lit. ‘to remove the skin (from sbdy)’, to speak (esp. badly) of someone who is not present, to gossip about someone.

culo [m] [taboo] 1 [not slang] bottom, low end (of a bottle); ass, butt (of a person); culos de botella (’bottle bottoms’): a pair of glasses with very thick lenses; 2 good luck, esp. in games (see orto).

curro [m] a scam, a fraud, a deception; a dirty business, an illegal arrangement. The corresponding verb is currar [vt]. Note that this word means ‘work, job’ (no negative connotations) in Spain.