"dale" revisited
I was at our worship band practice tonight, and one of the guys would say rather loudly ¡Dale! and the perceived effect was, we would start playing the song. After a while I just had to stop and find out why the heck they were saying "give him" or whatever. Well, that created a round of laughter at my expense, which was ok, but nobody could really tell me if they were using the verb Dar or not. I accused them of saying ¡vale! or ¡sale! or something like that, and they laughed even more. Anyway, they were saying Let's go! and there's really no grammatical explanation that I could understand anyway. In our band, there is one person from Panama, three from Mexico, one from Honduras and one from Puerto Rico, and they all agreed on the use of the command ¡Dale!, that it was a command to "go!". I have no idea if it's a composite word of 'da' and 'le' and I guess it doesn't really matter, but it doesn't seem to be.
Well, I found a previous thread and it was interesting reading the comments on this similar subject, but only the last comment on the thread had the right answer.
The dictionary here gives the definition as "There you go!", and none of the examples use it as "Let's go!" or "Go". I'm sure there are a lot of ways to use it, but after the beating I took tonight, I think I'm going to go with the definition that native speakers from four different countries gave me.
Is there anything else that I should know about "dale"?
Thank you.
2 Answers
Hi there, sorry that someone else hasn't chimed in but I do understand 'dale' it is very colloquial and it's 'para animar' to kind of cheer on - when they say 'dale' they are saying 'go for it' 'give it' and 'andale' is pretty well the same. You could say 'dale' when you want someone to step on the gas - that gives you a good example of the 'give it' idea but it's just saying 'come on guys - hit it!!' Did I explain it ok?
I would have thought they were saying "Andale"
