Is My Underwear Inside-Out or Is It Backwards?

4 Comments (Including One Discussion Thread)

 
So I’m getting dressed the other day. I slip on the undies and my wife says Tienes los calzoncillos al revés. I immediately assumed they were backwards. Namely, that the label side was in the front and the normal front part of the underwear, in the back. And here’s where we ran into a language problem. In reality I had them inside-out.
 
Turns out, the terms for inside-out and for backwards are both al revés in Spanish. There is no linguistic difference between the two.
 
My super-translator friend Natalia not only confirmed this, she also came up with the phrase me la he puesto del revés, lo de delante para atrás to clarify backwards instead of inside-out. That’s a serious mouthful just to say backwards.
 
As a side note, we also realized that al revés and del revés are basically the same.
 
Leave me some other examples of words that cannot clearly be translated easily in the comments. They may turn into a future post. (Future post here: Boca Abajo: Upside-down or Face Down)
 

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hehehe. One look would have clarified that.

And that's exactly what I had to do to realize they were inside-out! Language alone did not provide enough information.

This, of course, in Puerto Rican Spanish. I don't know if it is so in other countries :)

I immediately thought of "está cabrón." Depending on context, it can either mean "to be incredible, wonderful, amazing in a positive sense" (as per your definition), but in can also be an expression denoting something as either being very hard to do, or something very unfair.