De Peluche!

"How was your vacation?" I asked a 25-year-old worker who has been helping with the project of rebuilding our stone wall. For Semana Santa, the workers got paid their normal weekly wage but didn't work after Wednesday.

I asked him this in Spanish, and he replied, "De peluche!"

I didn't have a clue what that meant, so he added, "Muy divertido!" (Very diverting.)

I looked peluche up in my Franklin electronic dictionary and it said it meant plush, like velvet. So I asked the fellow about that. He said, yes, or like a bear. The expression seems to mean generally terrific.

Well, I wasn't sure if this was a phrase just used by the young or if it was one I could trot out myself, so the next day I asked the stonemason on the job. He said it wasn't a very correct phrase, but that there was nothing the matter with it.

Would he use it in speaking to his grandmother? Sure, he said, it's kind of an intimate phrase.

So you wouldn't use it if you encountered a lawyer that you knew?

He laughed at the idea and said no, you certainly wouldn't.

How was our Semana Santa? De peluche, because the Mexican neighbors who came down from Guadalajara for the holidays were pretty quiet!