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Coger (The most loaded verb in Spanish)


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VoicesEnEspanolDec 8, 2007 11:29am
Does anyone know the history behind this Spanish verb and how the meaning of it get perverted over the centuries? In Spain, "coger" means to take. But in Latin America, particularly Argentina and Mexico, coger means "to fuck".

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CastorQuinnDec 8, 2007 2:33pm
I don't know the specific history in this case, but the appropriation of common verbs to cover taboo subjects such as sex is very common in many languages. The semantic space for 'take, have, possess' is a common target for such pejoration in many languages.

We do the same in English, though the terminology is less denotational and more euphemistic: "Last night I had Suzie"; "I'm going to take her up the arse". German does exactly the same thing; Russian uses the verb 'have/own' to represent the act of sex. From memory a Bantu language (possibly !Xhosa, but my memory is a little fuzzy) - which has quite streamlined verbal semantics - uses the have/take/own group to represent sex as well.

I also know that Latin American Spanish tends to foreground their euphemisms quite a bit mroe than other languages. A friend of mine explained that continental Spanish used to be prestiged in many South American countries, so the local dialect was considered colloquial, but in recent times Espanola has been ousted as the gap has become too big between them. This means that now, what was previously a dialectal term in a non-prestiged language is now a mainstream colloquialism - the upshot of which is that pejorative/robust/euphemistic terminology is far more foregrounded in LA Spanish than it is in many languages.

So while I don't know the specific history of this change, the pattern is quite common, and it doesn't surprise me to find the term has such a dominant role in the discourse as it does in LA Spanish.


Coger (The most loaded verb in Spanish)

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