Monday, November 21, 2011

Si me toca el gordo, qué hago?

Literally speaking, Tocar el gordo means to touch the fat man. 

So, if you translated this as:

¿Si me toca el gordo, que hago?
If the fat man touches me, what do I do?

You'd be wrong.  Let's find out why.

OK, the truth is, whether or not your translation is wrong depends on context.  "El gordo" does mean the fat man, but it also has another meaning.

"El gordo" is  a colloquial way of referring to "la lotería".  And "lotería" means lottery in case you don't know.  You may also hear it called a sorteoSorteo is also the word you want if you need to talk about a raffle. 

Here are some examples of what a boleto de lotería and a boleto de sorteo might look like:

Where can you buy boletos de lotería?  It's pretty common to see boletos de lotería being sold in the streets.

It's not uncommon for us to refer to the lottery as "the big one", and "El gordo" is the Spanish version of that.  "El gordo" is universal, so you can use this with Spanish speakers from anywhere.

You may have wondered about the use of tocar in this sentence.  Literally "si me toca" translates to "if it touches me", but we wouldn't say that in English.  You could have easily said:

¿Si me gano el gordo, qué hago?
If I win the the big one, what do I do?

As you can see, using the verb ganar (to win) is more of a direct translation.  But using the verb tocar is also a very common way of expressing this.  It's also a good way of flexing your Spanish muscles and impressing your Spanish speaking friends.

And speaking of tocar, it's used in a few other ways you may find surprising.  But I'm not going to tell you what they  are in this post.  In fact, I'm not going to tell you at all, because another fellow blogger has already written a great post about this, so why reinvent the wheel?

My new found internet friend and Spanish aficionado runs the blog  Her blog focuses on Colombian Spanish and gives us some great insight on the language and culture of Colombia.  What makes her blog even more informative is that she is reporting directly from the city of Medellin.  I can't even begin to tell you how jealous I am.  Anyway, it's a great blog, check it out.

Here's the link to her post on the verb tocar.  If you're serious about learning Spanish, be sure to read it, because it's both informative, and amusing.  Not to mention it may very well save you some embarrassment.  

¿Me toca o me toco?

That's it for today, ¡hasta la próxima!


  1. Thanks, Rodney. You're very kind. I hope your readers find my blog as useful as they've found yours.

  2. thank you for the information, its new :)

  3. Thanks so much! This was quite useful.