Dutch prince surprises Mexicans with rude slang

Nov 5, 2009, 15:44 GMT

Mexico City - Prince Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands made Mexicans laugh with his use of Mexican slang that many mothers would have scolded their children for using, the media reported Thursday.

At a meeting with representatives of the energy sector Wednesday, the prince used the phrase, 'camaron que se duerme se lo lleva la chingada,' an expression that could roughly be translated as 'the shrimp that falls asleep is carried away by the current.'

Willem-Alexander, 42, meant to tell his audience that there is no time to waste in the effort to strive for energy efficiency and boost renewable energy sources.

However, 'chingada' is considered a very rude word in Mexican Spanish, meaning 'prostitute' among a wide range of uses: it can be used to tell someone to go to hell, to say that one is feeling bad or that something has gone wrong. Indeed, in the phrase that Willem-Alexander used the word is often replaced by euphemistic substitutes.

The Mexican daily Milenio reported on the incident on its front page Thursday, as did the newspaper Excelsior.

'Either someone played a joke on him, or the prince of the Netherlands wanted to make his message clear,' said the daily Reforma.

'Perhaps he had just got back from Tenampa,' Reforma added, referring to a famous tequila bar.

Prince Willem-Alexander is visiting Mexico with his mother, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, and with his own wife, Argentine-born Princess Maxima. The Spanish-speaking princess, however, is unlikely to have misled her husband in this particular matter, since the controversial word in question is Mexican slang that is not used in her native Argentina.