More Bad-Ass Spanish - ¡Pendejo!

Pedro Enrique Babiak
4 min readAug 24, 2020

A fun word that will get you into a brawl at any good Mexican restaurant

Mexi-Spanish: Pendejo
Photo: englishlikenative

WARNING: If you direct this word at a Mexican be prepared for fight or flight.

It’s one thing for you to call your Mexi-friend a pendejo, but if you call a Mexi-stranger a pendejo he (or she) will take offense. Some more violently than others. And this is not a chancla-throwing situation.

This is one-family-going-after-the-other-one type of war.

You have been warned.

With that in mind, when would you use pendejo so that you don’t get your ass chased down the street by an angry mob of sensitive Mexicans?

Compare and Contrast Pinche and Pendejo

(Good thing I paid attention in Mr. Johnson’s English 101 at UofMd Munich who beat Compare & Contrast into us).

Pinche is a word that has many meanings depending on tone of voice and the situation in which it’s used.

Pendejo leans that way but its range of definitions is more limited because it truly is used by Mexicans as a cuss word, unlike pinche, which is only SOMETIMES used as a cuss word.

Confused? Welcome to Mexi-Spanish.

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