In 1998, I spent five days in Angola for work. Angola was in the midst of a full-blown civil war. During these five days, we were accompanied for most of the time by an Angolan engineer, a Black man named Filipe, who was very friendly, cultured, and talkative, and had been educated in Portugal.
Among the topics discussed and conversed about, aside from the technical ones, as is common, were the differences and similarities in the language we spoke, both in terms of accent and the words used.
Things like "bicha" and "fila," "putos" or "miúdos" and "crianças," and how even within one of our countries, the variations were enormous, such as "pandorga" (in southern Brazil), "papagaio" (in the northeast), and "pipa" (in Rio), also "cafifa," "quadrado," "arraia," or "pepeta" in Acre and Amazonas.
Since the subject was fascinating, and triggered by the word “bicha” (which means "line" in Portugal), Filipe shared a vast vocabulary with a great sense of humor and loudly said: "I heard that in Brazil it’s like this: in Rio Grande do Sul it's ‘fresco,’ in São Paulo it's ‘gay,’ in Minas it's ‘entendido,’ in Rio de Janeiro it's ‘viado,’ in Maranhão it’s ‘qualira,’ in Ceará it’s ‘baitola,’ and in Bahia it’s ‘baiano’…”
Obviously, this joke could be applied to any region.
At that moment, we (me, Ivanildo Calheiros, and Filipe) were in the outskirts of Luanda, with a few Brazilian colleagues, one of whom was from Bahia. Surely due to the stress of being far from home in a warzone, he must have been at his limits and didn’t like the joke, reacting aggressively towards Filipe. It took almost physical intervention to calm him down… I could hardly believe it...
Bahians weren’t like they used to be... A Bahian now "gets stressed."
Miguel Fernández y Fernandez
Engineer and columnist
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