Friday, July 4, 2008

Sabes más que un pescado frito.

Sabes más que un pescado frito. This one's a pun I learned from some Venezuelan friends. Literally it means "You taste better than fried fish." But it's a pun because if you "sabes más que", that means "you know more than..", so the listener is expecting you to say something like "you know more than ... us, so-and-so, Einstein, etc. But then when you end the phrase with "pescado frito", the meaning of "sabes" changes to "you taste". Because "saber" is to know or to taste. It has two meanings.

coloquial, perhaps a Venezuelan idiom?, I'm not sure.

1 comment:

qñerty said...

This was difficult for me, because in Chile saber never means "to taste" (OK, I know some Chileans use this meaning of the word, but they are trying to use neutral Spanish). We would say tienes más sabor que un pescado frito. In most other contexts we say tener gusto a. For example, "it tastes like sugar" in Chile is tiene gusto a azúcar and not sabe a azúcar.