So I’m getting dressed the other day. I slip on the undies and my wife says: Tienes los calzoncillos al revés. I immediately assumed they were backwards. Namely, that the label side was in the front and the normal front part of the underwear, in the back. And here’s where we ran into a language problem. In reality I had them inside-out.
Turns out, the terms for inside-out and for backwards are both al revés in Spanish. There is no linguistic difference between the two.
My super-translator friend Natalia not only confirmed this, she also came up with the phrase me la he puesto del revés, lo de delante para atrás to clarify backwards instead of inside-out. That’s a serious mouthful just to say backwards.
As a side note, we also realized that al revés and del revés are basically the same.
Do you have other examples of confusions with BACKWARDS in Spanish? Leave me some other examples of words that cannot clearly be translated easily in the comments. They may turn into a future post like Boca Abajo: Upside-down or Face Down.
Check out these other English Spanish articles.
