My achy, breaky heart!
Billy Ray Cyrus sang a song "My Achy Breaky Heart". We all know that the words "achy" and "breaky" are improper grammar and are not even words. Right? But this song resonated with English speakers and made perfect sense nonetheless! Billy Ray took the two verbs, ache and break and transformed them into adjectives. Instead of an action, they are now a description.
My question then is: Is there a similar way to manipulate Spanish words in a manner that native speakers will understand? Now you understand I am not shooting for good grammar here. I am wondering if there is an obvious way in Spanish to manipulate words where everyone understands exactly what you are saying but they all realize it is a play on words as well. In English we can obviously add a "y" or "ey" and be understood.
Interesting note: The usage of the words changes in a sentence even though they are not real words...for example:
- ache: My heart aches.
- achy: My achy heart pines for you.
- break: Watch out: you will break my heart!
- breaky: My breaky heart can't stand much more!
4 Answers
In Spanish is very easy to make verbs into adjectives. and they are proper, for example my "My Achy Breaky Heart" to ache = doler achy= dolorido
to break= quebrar breaky= quebrado
Mi dolorido y quebrado corazon.
To answer your question we would need a native, I think, but I notice in the song nouns are converted to adjectives by adding 'y'.
In Spanish (and French) adjectives can sometimes be used as nouns - e.g. lo bueno, lo único, but the words themselves are not changed.
The only thing I can think of is adding 'ita' to get a diminutive - that seems to be permissible on almost anything!
Just a side note. Los Felinos remade this song in Spanish. link text
Disfrutelo!
Well, it's so-called licencia poetica. This trick allowed him to get a nice rhyming phrase, though actually he should have written: my aching, broken heart.
