I think the term "bridge" is a gross mis translation. The word 'bridge" is a metaphor.
Ah yes, the "puente". 40 years or so ago a few workers did not show up on Monday. Asking where they were I was told they were "haciendo puente".
Asked what bridge are they talking they about and everyone laughed at that. They then explained to me the idiomatic meaning of "haciendo puente",
adding a day to the weekend, bridging Saturday to Tuesday.
There are lots of idiomatic phrases in Mexico and learning them is sometimes embarrassing but usually lots of fun too.
AKgringo - 5-1-2023 at 03:13 PM
Did they come back to work for you, or was that a bridge too far?surabi - 5-2-2023 at 10:16 AM
When I was having my house built 17 years ago, my Spanish was very rudimentary and none of my workers spoke English. So I had to look up a lot of
words in my Spanish-English dictionary to tell them what I wanted done.
At one point they needed to dig a ditch for the septic pipe, so I looked up "ditch" and one of the translations was "trinchera". That made sense- a
trench.
But my workers looked confused, and when I explained by mimicking digging a ditch, they told me it was called a sanja.
I asked them what a trinchera was, then, and they pointed to the pile of bags of cement.
I guess that means they consider what are used in wartime to protect a trench, i.e. sandbags piled up, as the meaning of "trinchera", which seemed
strange.
