Word: piropo
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...cocacolismo has borrowed freely from the U.S., it has also put new life into an old Latin American custom, the piropo, or street-corner compliment. "My compliments to your mother," the boys say. "If you want to kill me, I'll die." For a girl in a green dress, the proper piropo is "If you're like this green, what you'll be when you're ripe!" As for the phantasmagoric girl who is already ripe, the boys draw on their memories-of Italian movies, and say: "What a Pampanini...
When a turn-of-the-century caballero inclined toward a passing beauty and murmured a loping compliment like this, the girl could walk away in disdain but could hardly 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...
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...
...gallant were trying to slip the 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...