Cortar boleta

Last week, Congress approved a new voting system: as of next year’s legislative elections, Argentines will be using a single paper ballot for national elections. My first thought was, “Oh, so we’re not going to say cortar boleta anymore.”

As we explored a bit last year, Argentina has plenty of electoral lingo which reflects the idiosyncrasies of our democracy. I’m not sure how it works in other countries that use paper ballots when they vote, but basically, each party printed its own distinctive ballot with all its candidates from the president to your local municipality. If you liked Party A you might vote lista completa or “the complete list”: you’d grab Party A’s particular ballot, pop it in the envelope, and head out. 

However, let’s say you liked Party A, but for whatever reason, you wanted to vote for Party B’s presidential candidate. How to go about it? Well, before last week’s decision, you would enter the cuarto oscuro with a pair of scissors and literally cortar boleta, “cut your ballot.” You’d have a little arts-and-crafts moment when casting your vote, cutting out Party A’s presidential candidate and putting the remainder of the ballot in the envelope alongside Party B’s presidential candidate — which you also had to cut out manually. 

Now that cortar boleta won’t be a thing anymore, at least not literally, I wonder if any new slang will come from having all candidates of every party on a single paper ballot.

You may also be interested in: Translation troubles: electoral edition

Machining

In an everyday example of thinning the veil between English and Spanish — a less generous term might be “bilingual bastardization” — I found myself typing, “I’m machining myself.” Something I could only say to a fellow Heraldian or my immediate family. 

Maquinarse is basically to wind yourself up, used almost exclusively as a reflexive verb because it’s something you do to yourself mentally. You can’t “machine” someone else. On looking this up, as per usual, I found the term means different things in different Spanish-speaking places. For the Real Academia Española, it’s closer to conspiring, while in Chile, maquinear means to get confused. In Argentina, if a friend tells you No te maquines they’re basically saying, “Hey, don’t spiral over this.” Like it’s that easy.

Hacer la plancha

In a discussion about certain judicial goings-on, the phrase hacer la plancha came up, which Amy inquired about because the first image it conjured up was of curmudgeonly magistrates doing plank exercises. Fair enough: that’s actually one meaning of hacer la plancha, just not in this context. 

Saying “make the iron” was of little help but the phrase does come from ironing because plancha and its derivatives refer to things lying flat. We have “ironing” or “being ironed” to denote resting or snoozing as well as the sartorial chore: my orange cat is planchado as I write this. If you’re in a pool you enjoy floating face up without moving your arms or legs: one way of “making the iron” or hacer la plancha. In our meeting’s context, though, hacer la plancha means coasting or doing the bare minimum. Or, in more recent parlance, “quiet quitting.”

The conversation unearthed a childhood memory of exhausting swimming survival workshops in England and being instructed, rather unnervingly, to do the “dead man’s float” — I’ll take hacer la plancha any day.

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