Monday, May 22, 2006

To Ubicate

I have discovered a new favorite Peruvian/Spanish verb: ubicarse. It means "to find oneself," and not in an existential way. When we are driving in the taxi, the dispatcher comes on the radio to ask different cars where they ubicate themselves. You might ask where a restaurant, store, or park is using ubicarse: "¿Dónde se ubica el restaurante?", or you might demand to know where your friend is when she's running a half hour late: "¿Dónde te ubicas?"

What's funny is that Spanish already has encontrarse, which is more literally "to find oneself" (still not existentially). According to my Spanish teacher, it's a fairly local expression. I tried to explain about "ubiquitous" in English, but somehow saying, "you know, when something is all around, or when you keep seeing the same things everywhere," didn't fully convey the meaning of the word.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Wow! After a wait of exactly one month and one day, my daughter is back at the blog. Hurray!!!