Pos for me they’re anything but useless, but for some they might as well be trash. Thrown right in there with all of the other undesirables that we find no use for anymore right before we send them off to massive landfills. It’s funny actually. The irony of life is such that when I first moved into my current neighborhood I kept hearing people say “las ragas, las ragas.”
I didn’t know exactly what they were talking about, but my Spanglish was good enough to decipher that it had something to do with rags… tiliches, if you will. You see just a couple of streets from where I live, a couple of blocks from one of the elementary schools in the barrio, people actually work all day sorting and packing old ugly rags that nobody wanted anymore. Some of them end up in thrift stores. Probably at one near you. The better clothes that is. The rest are sold across the globe as precisely that – rags. Tiliches that can be used to clean, to soak, or to do all kinds of other stuff.
It sounds kind of crazy, it’s true. Pero, you know, for someone who grew up with a mother that used to make quilts out of old shirts, jeans and shorts, this all seems quite logical también. ¿Apoco no? For an alternate definition, of course, I consulted the old Urban Dictionary to see what they had to say.
Specially used in Costa Rica (or Central America): an all purpose word which means “unuseful thing.”
Well… that’s another way to look at it. What’s your definition of Tiliches?
I’m always on the hunt for new mexi-vocabulario.
What other words would you like me to include in the mexi-vocabulario? If you have one that you would recommend please share it with me here.
Writer’s Disclaimer: When I say mexi-vocabulario I don’t necessarily mean these words are exclusively Mexican, or only used by Mexicans. This is simply an expression of how they were introduced to me in our Mexican Spanish.
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