A few years ago, while living in Puerto Rico, I came across a copy of Jared Romey’s excellent guide to local lingo, Speaking Boricua. Romey, an American expat who lived in Chile and Argentina, arrived in Puerto Rico only to find that his fluent Spanish was “of no use.”
Having mastered the distinctions between the words for “straw,” “stapler, and “pen” — not to mention “popcorn,” “kite,” and “women’s panties”–in his former host countries, Romey set out to capture the unique words and phrases of Puerto Rican Spanish.