Mayor Henry Sanchez attended the premiere of a documentary, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Spirit of the Midwives,\u00e2\u20ac? Tuesday night.<\/p>\n
I sat next to him, and he asked my take on the commonly used term \u00e2\u20ac\u0153sapo.\u00e2\u20ac? Now all of us know that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153sapo\u00e2\u20ac? is Spanish for toad and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153rana\u00e2\u20ac? is a frog, but I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not enough of a biologist to make a distinction. If it hops and has buggy eyes, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a frog. Period.<\/p>\n
Sanchez said all of us are aware of what the term means and when it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s used, but he wants to dig deeper: why do we call lucky strikes sapos? As a long-time high school and college coach, Sanchez certainly has seen a number of sapos.<\/p>\n
Dictionaries define sapo variously as a person with low self-esteem, a secret-keeper and one who tries to hide his or her identity. The three definitions definitely relate to each other.<\/p>\n
Around here, a sapo is any serendipitous event that transcends natural ability, usually athletic. The word is generally uttered by the person who didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get the lucky hit and is intended to mean, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have made that shot (or putt or basket or base hit or spike or slam dunk) by yourself. Divine intervention played a part.\u00e2\u20ac? We don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t use sapo to refer to our own hole-in-one or 25-foot jump shot. No-oo, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not a sapo, nor did anything divine intervene.<\/p>\n
On the playground at Immaculate Conception School decades ago, I got used to the term. Any fly ball, basket or pass that I snared, scored or caught went under the heading of sapo. But sapo or not, it still counted.<\/p>\n
In years of covering sports, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seldom seen a sapo like one that happened to my Railroad Avenue neighbor David Vigil, when he played basketball for the I.C. Colts.<\/p>\n
In a scramble for the ball, Vigil ended up on the floor, and as he hurled the ball ahead, to pass it to a teammate, the bloomin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 thing went into the hoop \u00e2\u20ac\u201d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153puro net,\u00e2\u20ac? as we all said the next few days when that was all anybody at I.C. could talk about. Even the Cincinnati-raised nuns at the school acquired the new expression.<\/p>\n
Does the derivation of the term sapo have anything to do with fairy tale lore in which a kiss transforms a frog (or is it a toad?) into a prince?<\/p>\n
Earlier this football season, Oakland Raider fans were ecstatic over what they thought was a last-second victory over the Denver Broncos, as the Oakland kicker \u00e2\u20ac\u0153split the uprights,\u00e2\u20ac? as they say.<\/p>\n
But not so fast. The Denver coach had just called a time-out, which nullified the play. So the kicker had to do it again. And missed. Denver then scored to win, but let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not discuss that right now \u00e2\u20ac\u201d or ever.<\/p>\n
The phantom timeout worked in the Raiders\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 favor in a later game. But Monday night, in the most incredible game I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve watched in years, the Buffalo Bills, underdogs to the Dallas Cowboys, grasped defeat from the jaws of victory.<\/p>\n
With Dallas ready to attempt a long field goal, Buffalo tried the last-second time out, supposedly to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153ice the kicker,\u00e2\u20ac? rookie Nick Folk, and the ball went over the goalpost, but it didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t count. Time had been called.<\/p>\n
So what are the chances of Folk\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s making the 53-yard field goal twice? Well, in a supreme monument to sapo-dom, the second kick was good too. Few people have ever seen such a game.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
Was it a sapo or two for LeDoux residents David and Rita Griego when one of their cows calved and produced two healthy calves? The event, written about in Ricky DeHerrera\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Mora page in the Optic, is highly improbable. And more so when it happens a month later.<\/p>\n
David Griego, who raises 70 head of cattle at the D-and-R Ranch, said he understands the odds of twins are about 1 in 4,000. But what are the odds, with a small herd, of only 30 mother cows, of its happening twice (not by the same cow, during the same calving period)?<\/p>\n
The births happened earlier this fall, weeks apart. Griego said nearby ranchers, Arnold and Harold Trujillo, who run a Mora County ranch, were blessed with twin calves, about 10 years ago. Though both calves were born alive, one of them died later.<\/p>\n
Griego said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Usually when a cow has twins, one of them is stillborn.\u00e2\u20ac? He said he raises his cattle organically, with no supplements. Even the alfalfa he feeds them is insecticide-free.<\/p>\n
When two improbable events occur, you multiply the probabilities, making infinitesimal the chance of four new healthy calves. But David, as a retired Mora High School math teacher, needs to crunch the numbers himself. Any guess on my part would be a sapo.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
Liz Conescu of Las Vegas forwarded a list of neologisms supplied by the Washington Post. The newspaper takes submissions in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.<\/p>\n
\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a partial list:<\/p>\n
Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one coughs.<\/p>\n
Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.<\/p>\n
Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.<\/p>\n
Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.<\/p>\n
Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightgown.<\/p>\n
Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.<\/p>\n
Gargoyle (n.), olive-flavored mouthwash.<\/p>\n
Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline.<\/p>\n
Frisbeetarianism (n.), (back by popular demand): The belief that, when you die, your Soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
And finally, this item \u00e2\u20ac\u201d puro pun-ishment \u00e2\u20ac\u201d came into my mailbox this week:<\/p>\n
Those who jump off a bridge in Paris are in Seine.<\/p>\n
A man\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s home is his castle, in a manor of speaking.<\/p>\n
Dijon vu: the same mustard as before.<\/p>\n
Practice safe eating \u00e2\u20ac\u201d always use condiments.<\/p>\n
Shotgun wedding: A case of wife or death.<\/p>\n
A hangover is the wrath of grapes.<\/p>\n
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mayor Henry Sanchez attended the premiere of a documentary, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Spirit of the Midwives,\u00e2\u20ac? Tuesday night. I sat next to him, and he asked my take on the commonly used term \u00e2\u20ac\u0153sapo.\u00e2\u20ac? Now all of us know that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153sapo\u00e2\u20ac? is Spanish for toad and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153rana\u00e2\u20ac? is a frog, but I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not enough of a biologist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}