Una Palabra Sola Episode 17, suavemente
Life isn’t known for being smooth… but the present moment is.
suavemente: (adv) smoothly, fluidly, delicately, gently
Synonyms: delicadamente (delicately), fluidamente (fluidly), con tacto (tactfully), blandamente (gently, softly, mildly), ternura (tenderness)
Antonyms: áspero (rough, rugged), brusco (brusque, rude, sudden), duro (hard), estridente (strident, garish, loud), fuertemente (strongly), violentamente (violently)
From the Latin “suāvis”, sweet, pleasant, delicious
You can’t think about flow or suavemente from just an English perspective. Flow finds a different way in different languages.
For reflection:
How are you feeling internally, and what are you projecting externally? Are these feelings in alignment?
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Breathe into the present moment and THEN try speaking Spanish. How does that feel differently than if you were to just sit and react to a conversation?
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Think about what you would like to see more smoothness or ease in… what are two ways to bring more ease into that thing, whether it’s a relationship, task, or project?
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Una PS has been a labor of love from the beginning. If you’d like to join our lil’ love fest via the Deseo program, click here to sign up! We all have our own wishes and desires when it comes to language, and with some resources and accountability, I can help make yours come true.
TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
Hola y bienvenidos, hello and welcome to Una Palabra Sola, where we get to learn Spanish one word at a time. I'm your host Megan Miller, founder and teacher at Aprovechar Language Solutions. Empezamos and let's dive in.
Suavemente, bésame. Quiero sentir tus labios besándome otra vez.
Hello and welcome back to Una Palabra Sola, a podcast where we get to learn one Spanish word a la vez, one Spanish word at a time. Nuestra palabra, it is a song, it is a movement, it is a culture. And it is a word, Suavemente, por Elvis Crespo. So suavemente, this is un adverbio, which means it's an adverb, it likes to tag along with verbs and describe them.
1:01
And what this word actually means, other than, you know, just being a little party, is gently, delicately, or fluidly, suavemente. So, it's used, quite honestly, more in Spanish, I think, than English, but, you can use it on, con piel, on your skin, like suave y aterciopelado, so like velvety, you can have un trabajo suave, like a smooth job, and basically it just means dispuesto a complacer.
It's like ready, available to kind of placate or compromise a little bit. As with pretty much every single word in Spanish, this is from Latín. Suavis. And you have some synonyms and antonyms, but first I want to talk about la cultura. So, you have Elvis Crespo, which he is a merengue singer, really from the mid-1990s to now.
He's Boricua, he's Puerto Rican, and Suavemente was his breakout solo album and song. Obviously, on this, he's talking about love. Suavemente bésame. Like, smoothly kiss me. Que quiero sentir tus labios, I want to feel your lips. Besándome otra vez. Kissing me again. Really, going into YouTube, which has the song and going into the comments, this is a song for parties. It is a dancing song, right? You move your hips. You feel the beat. You let yourself dance instead of focusing on how you look or what people think or say, or think about leaving enough room for Jesus when you dance. No, there's a time for Jesus on Sundays. Saturdays are for dancing.
And that is what this song is. This song is to Latinos like Britney Spears’ Toxic music video is to all millennials. It's a song, it's a music video, but it is also the underlying culture. And you can see this more recently with El Conejo Malo, Bad Bunny; whether you love or hate his music, he is definitely known as someone who really works to elevate the Latino, Latinx, Latiné, whatever, culture. With his music video for Neverita, Little Refrigerator, Neverita, it mirrors Elvis Crespo's Suavemente video. And Suavemente, yes, it is a song, it is a music video, it's a piece of culture, and going back to the word, because this is Una Palabra Sola. This is all about doing things kind of in a smooth, easy, gentle kind of movement or motion.
3:59
Because we don't really use smooth a lot in English, other than like a smooth talker, or smooth jazz, or smooth transition, like Smooth Criminal, Michael Jackson, or Sade's Smooth Operator, and every lotion commercial ever. It doesn't have such a big cultural piece to it, which I think is hard to think about and really respect Suavemente in Spanish by thinking about it from an English perspective.
Thinking about suavemente from that English perspective, it's really just having no roughness or unevenness. It's free from irregularities and inequalities. It's just easy… Delicately, softly; it has this kind of confidence and competence, like this cool factor, like Fonzie in his leather jacket or, you know, cool is just this construct that other people have. Confidence and competence are up to you to feel.
But this suavemente, this really comes back to having this delicadamente, fluidamente, con tacto, blandamente, ternura, that question of tenderness, of kindness, of ease, that you find in the hispanohablante culture. It's not necessarily this go, go, go. Let's reach all these KPIs and do all these things. And we're failures as people and as a society if we don't. It's more like, hey, we're just going to kind of go with the flow. It's more type B than type A. If, if you want to do it that way.
Digging into the neuro linguistics a little bit - bear with me here- this suave, this concept of suave, it also calls to mind another song, Rico Suave, like rich and smooth. It feeds into this kind of stereotype of like smooth Spanish players, romantics, like machismo. But the neurolinguistics themselves, this is a really big duh moment. So, of course, a subset of people look at romance differently when you have sayings like, mi amor, el amor de mi vida, mi vida, me muero por tu amor.
6:42
Things get a little bit more involved than in English. And Suavemente- yes, it has this kind of party sense to it, but if you look at the lyrics themselves, it's really just a big love song. And love in Spanish is a lot different than love in English. In English, we say, I love you. Because we're so individualistic, the I comes first. In Spanish, yes, the verb is conjugated to the yo, like amo, quiero, but the direct object, the person receiving the love comes first. Te amo a ti. Le amo a él. Le amo Alejandro, or Alejandra, or whomever.
So, looking into the neurolinguistics, of course we're going to look at romance and life and just la vida cotidiana a little bit differently in one language than the other. And one last thing, so this comment from YouTube is, una cancion obligada en las fiestas. It's an obligated, it's una cancion requisita. It's a required song. Un icono jamas pasará de modo. It will never ever get old. And it's just going to go from generación a generación. Like, it's just going to live through all of the generations. It's a lot more I think because this song and the lyrics just kind of encapsulate this party, this dancing, this sentido, this sense.
8:30
The sense of this is how we live and this is what we're going to do and we're going to dance and, hey, qué será, será, like, whatever will be, will be, whatever, like, let's just focus on right now. And it's one of those things where I think it's just going to live on from time to time to time.
So, going back to the word suavemente, of course you have sinónimos, delicadamente, delicately, fluidamente, fluidly, con tacto, or with tact, blandamente, con ternura, all of that, gentleness. Blandamente is like gently or softly, kind of mildly, if you want to think of bland.
Some antónimos or antonyms. You have áspero and áspera. It is what it sounds. It's rough, it's rugged. If you have something áspero. You can also have brusco, which is like brusque; brusco or like rude or sudden, de repente. You can have something duro, or hard. Estridente, kind of garish or loud; strident is that SAT word in English. And then you can have fuertemente, so, strongly, so suavemente versus fuertemente or violentamente, violently.
And just as a reminder that mente on the end, M E N T E, mente is really equal to that L Y in English. So, suavemente is smoothly versus suave is smooth. Violencia, violence, that's your noun, versus violentamente, which is violently. Fuerte, which is strong. You can have café fuerte, versus fuertemente, which is strongly. And that mente, once again, that is your adverbio. That's your adverb. So, we all go through life… in general, but your adverbios, those are how you go through life.
10:36
So, do you do it soft and easy and gently like a cloud of marshmallow puff with suavemente ? Do you have la suavidad, which is softness or gentleness or tenderness? Do you have ternura? Or are you going through life con acciones ásperas or acciones duras? Or are you going through life fuertemente? And there's no wrong answer. It's just more of how you think of yourself, and not only how you come across in your external life, but also internally. Like, do you think of yourself as gentle or fluid or suave?
Does that change with language or context? Obviously, probably. We are all a little bit more fuerte when someone cuts us off in traffic, versus if we're just smoothly going down the highway with no traffic in sight. Usually, context does rule. But as you get deeper in your language journeys, that's where you can really kind of start to look inward and see some of the differences of speaking or thinking in one language versus the other. In English, I tend to have this image of myself that's quite honestly pretty awkward, uh, not really smooth. Sometimes when I'm talking and I get really into things, I forget to breathe. I choke on my own spit a little bit too much to be normal, uh, but when I'm on a roll, I can, you know, speak fluidly.
Same in Spanish. When I'm on a roll, I can speak fluidly, but if I stop and I think or overthink, it feels a lot more awkward. Less suave. And it just kind of reminds me of like a dancer, right? Really awkward, kind of bumbly on the street, but as soon as they get on stage and they know the steps, everything kind of falls in place.
12:50
And how you think about yourself or how you project or want to project, it's going to change. And it's okay to change. Expect the change. Not everything is going to be smooth because there's going to be homework and glitches and bumps and bruises because that is what quite honestly life is known for. Bruised knuckles and bloody knees. But when it does fall into place, that's when you can really enjoy the ride. And when you're starting to feel awkward, you know, just summon the courage and confidence from Spanish and smooth things out. Like, the thing that I love about the Spanish language and culture is that it celebrates being in the present moment. And this is from, of course, an outsider gringa perspective. But it's really about the present moment. So, speaking about songs, there's also a salsa song that I've been listening to; well, it's been coming up in my Spotify a ton. Yo No Sé Mañana. And it's all about, I don't know about tomorrow, but let's just enjoy tonight.
14:04
It's the same kind of thing. I want to live suavemente in this life right now. Suavemente yo quiero sentir tus labios besándome otra vez. Like, yep, right now I want to be just smooching along. Versus, let me do these nine things on my to do list and then do all of these other things and then maybe martyr myself and be super individualistic and maybe we'll get around to it.
Quite honestly, a lot of life is faking it. It's not necessarily feeling one way internally, but it's rather feeling or projecting something externally. I always think of a duck. A duck might be paddling like hell underwater, or it might just be kind of coasting around a lake or a river or pond or wherever ducks are, and it's really all about what people see. So, the aspect that people see versus what's happening under the surface. And if there's one thing that all of this social psychology, neurolinguistics, therapized, woke, whatever cultural words… if there's one thing that's come out of this, it's always that people have an inner life and they have a lot of things happening under the surface. There are a lot of thoughts and feelings and emotions kind of happening under the surface at any given time. And under that surface, you might feel awkward or you might not feel confident or you might feel a certain way, which might evoke whatever kind of awkward or uncomfortable emotions, but you can project having un acento suave. You can project hablando suavemente or hablando con fluidez.
16:12
A lot of that is practice and a lot of that is how you look at things, kind of your own mindset. For that peak confidence and competence in Espanol, definitely check out my monthly program, Deseo, at deseospanishprogram.info.
With that, it's all about being, I think, aware and being accepting of the fact that what you feel internally may not be what you need or want to project externally. They may not always marry and that's okay because that is growth. That's change. Así es la vida. That's life.
And, honestly, when it, when you need, think about Suavemente. Elvis, he starts the song out a capella. Suavemente. When you think about that and you think about just being in the present moment, thinking about a cappella, I can make my own rhythm. I don't have to go in somebody else's harmonies. Let's just get through this one present moment and then focus on the next step and the next and the next. Language becomes a little bit easier. And talking about el próximo pasito, definitely stick around for season two, la segunda temporada de este show.
También, check out show notes, transcript, request a word, or be on the show at Aprovechar.me. Until next time, un abrazo fuerte.
Gracias otra vez, and thank you so much for coming along with me on this ride to Una Palabra Sola. Be sure to check out the show notes for additional worksheets and materials. If you have a word that you would like me to review, please feel free to let me know at Aprovechar Language Solutions.com
Hasta la próxima vez, until next time.