Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Creerse la divina garza

Alicia se cree la divina garza desde que fue a college.

And Yes, that's the word college. Nothing like a bit of Spanglish eh?

I got this little bit of Spanish from a book I'm reading, La Casa en Mango Street. A great book by the way. It's perfect for reading in Spanish, the chapters are short (1-3 pages) and the Spanish isn't too bad, although there's quite a bit of slang. But I digress.

So what does this mean, creerse la divina garza? In English we might say something like to think you're all that, or to think you're better than everyone else.

So when we translate our sentence, "Alicia se cree la divina garza desde que fue a college", we get something to the effect of "She thinks she's all that since she went to college".

Here's another example using creerse la divina garza.

Columba: Me choca Elsa. Se ha pasado toda la noche presumiendo su nuevo vestido.
Ramona: Tienes razón. Se cree la divina garza .


Columba: I can't stand Elsa. She's been showing off her new dress all night.
Ramona: You're right. She thinks she's all that.


Surprisingly, I managed to find a little history about the origination of this phrase, although I lost the link to where I found it. It's in Spanish, and I'm going to post it here for those of you who want to read it yourself:

Se cree la divina garza.

Fase aplicada a la mujer que presume de modo exagerado. Se dice que su origen tuvo lugar cuando una hermosa adivinadora apellidada Garza se ganó la envidia de otras mujers que trataban de imitarla, quienes al discubrir a alguna perifollada, decían: Se cree la adivina Garza

I took a stab at translating this myself, and got a little asistance from the folks at WordReference. The thread is here, but this is basically the gist of it:

This applies to the woman that shows off in an exaggerated manner. It's origin was in a place when a beautiful psychic with the last name Garza won the envy of other women who tried to imitate her and started saying about other flashy woman: she believes she's the psychic Garza.

I have one more example that will make sense now that you know the history of the phrase...

"Yo no me creo la Divina Garza… ¡Yo soy la Divina Garza!".
I don't think I'm the the Divina Garza, I am the Divina Garza.

There's also a similar expression - "creerse el ombligo del mundo ". Literally it means something like "To believe you're the belly button of the world", in other words, to think the world revolves around you.

I think you can have a lot of fun with this one. ¡Disfrutalo!

1 nhận xét:

Saeclorum
July 30, 2021 at 10:38 AM

thank you so much for this, im reading the same book and was struggling to find anything on this, I have in in spanish and english to learn spanish, I look up words i dont know, but sometimes i have to look at the english text for idiomatic phrases like this, where all information for the phrase can really only be found in spanish, i like to call this the deep end of the spanish language,

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