Walking Spanish [antelogism]

October 7, 2008 at 3:21 pm (Fiction, Neologism)

While gchatting with Shani, she casually used the phrase “walking spanish” that she picked up from a book we both have read (or are reading, in my case), and I wanted to toss it into the neologism pot. In researching it without my copy of the book (“Then We Came to the End,” by Joshua Ferris), I discovered that it’s no neologism after all.

The characters coin the phrase Walking Spanish to refer to the laid off workers, as in, “the folks at my firm are walking spanish.” Sadly, when Shani used the phrase, it was used casually because of the recession, and it actually applies. Damn life imitating art! The phrase, as acknowledged by the slightly clueless characters, comes from a Tom Waits song, which according to a New York Times review of the book, is “a phrase with origins in pirate days borrowed from a Tom Waits song about an execution.”

According to my extensive internet researches, the phrase didn’t originate with Waits’ definition.

Anyway, I recently discovered that “walking Spanish” means, literally, being forcibly carried from a place by one’s collar and belt, with one’s tiptoes scrabbling at the floor, so that the Spanish walker is being forced to go somewhere he doesn’t want to go. The expression derives from being made to walk the plank on a pirate ship, but a more modern example might be being thrown out of a bar.

—A Second Hand Conjecture

So, while this isn’t a Shani-ism, I think phrases from books are fair game for the neologism feature.