Word: maracaibo
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...fail to blush with pleasure. Indeed, the word for this kind of verbal pass, piropo, is said to come from the Greek pyropos, meaning burning face. Fashioning the piropo used to be one of the pleasantest professions of Latin America, and nowhere was it practiced more artistically than in Maracaibo, a city rich with oil and romance. A proper piropo, while flowery and fresh, was never offensive, e.g.: "Ah, to be the hand which powders that cheek!" But the worldwide lapse of good manners in the 20th century made the piropo bolder: "Say, baby, I'll be a citizen...
Slowly all the poetry went out of piro-peando. In recent years, girls have had to listen to such blunt acclaim as "Hey, Mamacita!" or "What a chicken!" In disgust, Maracaibo's prefect made piropos punishable with a loo-bolivar ($30) fine, which brought a new piropo into fashion: "If I only had 100 bolivars...
...senorita a love letter in church. At last, it got so that the most inspiring girl could move past a city block of curbside Romeos and hear only frustrated mumbles. Solemnly taking note, the Venezuelan newspaper El National last week reported that the piropo, once the boast of Maracaibo, is dead...
...Bank and private interests in Latin American countries, I.H.C. also has an ambitious hotel-building program underway. Scheduled to open next fall, in time for the projected Inter-American Conference of Nations, is Caracas' $7,000,000, 400-room Tamanaco. Bogotá's 400-room Tequendama and Maracaibo's 150-room Del Lago, opening later in the year, will finally give those cities first-class hotels ; and the 600-room Copan, due to be completed in 1954, will help fill the urgent need for more and better hotel accommodations in booming São Paulo...
Creole did not always belong to Jersey. The name was engraved originally on the shares of a stock promotion of the '20s called the Creole Syndicate, which had concessions on an expanse of shallow water in Lake Maracaibo, in western Venezuela, covering a tremendous oil reservoir. Jersey bought control of the syndicate, combined it with other Venezuelan holdings into Creole Petroleum Corp., punched holes into Lake Maracaibo's bottom from specially developed drilling barges. Now there are 2,000 lake wells, each a little steel-and-concrete island separated by a strip of water, forming...