How to speak Argentine.

• Author: Mira, Leslie M.
• Position: Americas !Ojo!

ARGENTINE SPANISH--a tongue of occasional jeering and gibber by fellow Latin Americans--has won a new badge of credibility at home. Argentina's Academy of Letters has published its first-ever Diccionario del habla de los argentinos, uniting in one book the lexicographical quirks of a nation sprawled from Patagonia hills to northern provinces where Quechua is spoken, to the port capital Buenos Aires.

The 609-paged dictionary is full of surprises. For the dimwitted among us who may think that papa refers to a father or potato, the dictionary sets us straight: Papa can also mean a pretty woman. To be a papa ("ser una papa") is an easy task.

Nearly two pages are devoted to mate, the tealike brew that Argentines sip daily through a metal straw. Colloquial expressions--such as milico, a pejorative word for soldier or police agent--are included as is the musical catingoso--a word of Quechua origin that means "smelly."

"A dictionary is a monument to language," says Francisco Petrecca, a Buenos Aires linguist with the Academy of Letters who helped compile the dictionary's more than thirty-five hundred entries. "It is always evolving and is necessarily incomplete." Petrecca quotes eighteenth-century dictionary scribe Samuel Johnson: "Dictionaries are like watches: Not one has the exact, time, but it's important to have one."

Yellowed and fresh newspaper clippings are scattered on Petrecca's desk--evidence of the linguist at work, Petrecca, like other dictionary writers, combs through newspapers and magazines searching for words gaining new currency among journalists. "I don't even read the stories--I'm just looking out for new words," he says. Petrecca and another linguist spent almost two years tracking and listing words and writing the book.

Petrecca makes a strong case for why Argentine Spanish is especially fertile ground--although he diplomatically refuses to say if Argentine Spanish can count more locally generated words in its...