Of the many themes that gaucho slang and sayings often relate to, drunkenness, injustice, whores and horses provide the most common threads. Some examples are:
1) "More stubborn than a drunk at the door."
2) "More stubborn than a one-eyed horse." (Horses are not only the sole mode of transportation among the gauchos, but are characters in their lives and stories. Every horse has "sus mañas," his particularities, and one of the most common sources of slang comes from cataloging the particularities of one's horse's stubbornness -- a horse that doesn't like to cross rivers, for instance, or another that will stop suddenly, even in full gallop, as soon as the ground under his feet changes from grass to gravel. In general, though, a one-eyed horse is considered the most mañoso of all, because he can be counted, above all else, to be suspicious of any change in his environment, owing to his minimized ability to perceive that change. Often horses that lose an eye are killed outright and eaten, and when a family runs out of mutton and has to slaughter a new sheep, the man will often, as he's putting on his jacket to head for the slaughterhouse, say, "Time to find the one-eyed horse.")
3) "You wouldn't give the keys to the bodega to a drunk." -- You wouldn't do something stupid.
4) "Older than injustice."
5) "More certain than injustice."
6) "Whore's milk." -- Something very bitter.
7) "The whore's tongue." -- Used to describe a stutterer because, as one gaucho described it, "the stutterer wants to get the second word in before he's gotten the first word out."
The gauchos are for the most part irreligious, which is not to say they're unaware of the huge influence that catholicism has over Chile and Argentina. To the contrary, they consider most things that must be ordained by an outside source -- a priest, a president, or a general -- to be at best an inconvenince and at worst just more evidence of their institutionalized disenfranchisement, and their hatred or ambivalence toward catholicism coupled with a deep understanding of its effect on them makes for a lot of ironic commentary. Gauchos' spiritual predilections, though they would not apply these words to themselves, often fall more towards buddhism and taoism and straight atheism than they do toward christianity. The lone exception is the universal belief in Satan, and whenever a man or woman does something harmful or irreversible or inexplicable, they claim to have "seen" Satan in the days or hours before the event, and he always looks the same: a gaucho who dresses all in black, rides a black stallion fitted in the finest hardware, and in his face, which is polished obsidian, one only sees one's own reflection. Depending upon who's telling the story, some people have actually seen the Devil and others use the metaphor to mean that whatever evil they caused came not from Satan, but from themselves. As one gaucho said, "When a man decides to kill a man, he wants to blame his urge on someone -- anyone -- but when he looks at Satan, hoping to cast the blame on him, the man is left to face himself." In any event, the story of the Devil was one that every person I interviewed related to me with only the slightest variance, a remarkable fact in a place that, because of the great distances between peoples' cabins, there were often few other similiarities in the things they talked about and the way in which they talked about them.
Other sayings:
1) "Older than when farts were flung with slingshots"
2) "Harder than an Indian's heel"
3) "Like one rooster in another one's yard" -- Used for someone who feels very out of place
4) "Slicker than chapalele in a Chilote's throat" -- Chapalele, a delicacy on the Big Island of Chiloe, is boiled bread
5) "Knocking around like a biscuit in a crazy manšs luggage" -- For someone who is bored or feeling somehow trapped
6) "Where night finds him, he lives" -- This saying has two meanings; one is simply that when a man is traveling over a long distance by horse, he sleeps wherever he is when the sun goes down. The second meaning is used when a man makes a mistake -- if he kills another man, for example -- that will haunt him or otherwise affect his life forever.
7) "More stopped-up than a visitor's farts."
8) "Sometimes God gives bread to a man without teeth"
9) "That's as important to me as a cucumber."
