1. The notion of ahorita
Ask a Mexican to do something and he’ll reply ‘ahorita te lo hago’, which, to the untrained linguist, may sound like he will do it shortly. ‘Ahora’ meaning now, ‘-ita’ being the diminutive, it literally means ‘a little later’, but then again, these people are not literal. In the slightest. ‘Ahorita’ will mean anything from now, in two hours, maybe next week, maybe next Winter or maybe never. It’s something I found quite difficult to get my head round at first, as the meaning doesn’t change with tone or exclamation, it just kind of depends on the person you’re speaking to and the task at hand. Take my many coffee sessions with my great friend Chava, or Salvador (translation: the Saviour. No joke). He would say to me ‘ahorita voy por allá’, which meant ‘I haven’t left my house yet and I don’t intend to do so for the next half hour, if you’re lucky’.