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Comment by thinbeige | Hacker News Reader

tl;dr (one sentence taken from the post):

“When a Mexican says ‘ahorita’, it could mean tomorrow, in an hour, within five years or never.”

OK, so in Spanish, "ahorita" means "right now". In Mexican Spanish, it means more like "We're friends, so I hope that it'll be soon. But then we're friends, so I don't expect that you'll give me a hard time if it's not soon."

Ahorita is not used outside of Mexico, in other Spanish spoken countries, you use ahora.

Sorry but this is incorrect. I lived in Peru for 4 years and speak to my Peruvian wife in Spanish everyday, they use ahorita the exact same way they do in Mexico, Peru even uses more diminutive than Mexico, and I know it's the same in Bolivia, Chile and Colombia that I have visited. Looks like the author of this article doesn't know a lot about Latin America. I also know Puerto Rico is big on diminutive, so I'd say it's pretty much every single country in Latin America that speaks Spanish, they all use ahorita and even ahoritita this way.

Ahorita is not used in Argentina. I am almost sure it is not used in Uruguay or Chile either.

I've never been to Argentina so you must be right, Uruguay and Argentina being similar in culture and language it's probably not used there either. Ahorita is used in Northern Chile at least where I visited but maybe that's because it used to be Peruvian land, the rest of Chile may be different.

I'm from Colombia and can confirm: we use "ahorita" all the time, with the exact meaning described in the article.

The article claims Mexicans are not famous for their use of diminutives. They're not where I come from. I actually recall Peruvians and Venezuelans during my travels through South America mocking me (in a friendly way) for the fact that, in their view, Colombians use diminutives all the time.

In Colombia we mock people from Santander for using diminutives all the time. Or we don't mock but we notice it a lot.

According to the article, "ahorita" in standard Spanish is the imperative.

Then that article is wrong, because "ahorita" in Spanish is just the diminutive form of "ahora" which means "now". "Ahora" is an adverb and therefore has no imperative form, unlike verbs.

You'd never hear "ahorita" in Spain, unless someone is trying to mock Mexicans.

Thanks. I've never even visited Spain.

But then, I wonder why Google Translate gives "right now" for "ahorita". Is it used that way in any Spanish-speaking countries? Me, I just know Mexico.

And here's an hypothesis: The use of "ahorita" to mean "perhaps sometime in the indefinite future" correlates with the share of indigentes in the population. So you wouldn't see it in Costa Rica, for example, or even among Mexican criollos.

Right, not imperative. Is there an analog for adverbs?

No, according to the article, “most Spanish speaking countries” (not “standard Spanish”, which isn't a thing) use the diminutive form “ahorita” as more immediate form of “ahora” (“right now” vs. “now”.) Which has nothing to do with (an orthogonal concern to) the imperative, which is used in issuing commands.

Just like when an English speaker says "soon" then.

uhm more like "soonish" maybe? oh those Anglos and their confusing way to express time...

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