Most foreigners living in Spain think they have enough Spanish to recognise the second word in the title as an offensive name corresponding to a male bodily appendage…. but is it?
Well, the truth is that its ‘impact’ value as an oath corresponds roughly to the British one, ‘hell,’ which is certainly not taboo enough to set sensitive ladies barking or small dogs fainting, is it?
The proper translation of the article title is: What the Hell’s the Matter with Google and not:
what knob passes with Google. You see, pollas is a very Granadian expression, which is why an Almuñécar lad has managed to design a Google, search-engine page as: Que Pollas Buscas – nothing wrong with that use of the language!
David Carbonell at first set up the customized Google search engine for fun, but he soon realised that it was attracting a lot of following, so now he is taking it seriously, himself.
What he did was to simply register the domain name quepollasbuscas.es on the 16th of November. Next day he logged on to his facebook and twitter accounts and was astounded that hundreds of people had left comments about it – after that it took off even further.
Now for more explanations about the very versatile word pollas:
Spanish: Esto es la polla.
Literally: This is the knob.
Translation: This is great/not great.
Spanish: Me suda la polla!
Literally: It makes my knob sweat!
Translation: I couldn’t give a damn!
Spanish: Que pollas!
Literally: What knobs!!
Translation: What the hell (or) no way!
Spanish: Vayamos a pollas que…!
Literally: That we should go to the knobs that…!
Translation: Should it turn out that…!
Spanish: Deja de pollas!
Literally: leave out the knobs!
Translation: Stop farting around!
Spanish: Tócate la polla!
Literally: Grab your knob!
Translation: What utter rubbish!
Spanish: Y una polla!
Literally: And a knob!
Translation: No way!
And finally (but there are many more…)
Spanish: No me sale de la polla!
Literally: It does not come out of my knob!
Translation: Because I can’t be buggered! (which for our non-native English speakers is just as misleading…)
Article adapted from the 'Seaside Gazette'
