06.15.08
Soy Iron Man!*
Noted and cringed at (just a little bit):
In a recent review of Iron Man (pretty good flick, by the way), we spot:
. . . the film’s big finale feels more like a requisite mano y mano showdown that never lives up to everything preceding it.
I kinda agree with the evaluation of the big action scene. But as the author of Everything You Know About English Is Wrong, I must also point out that everything you know about Spanish is wrong. The phrase is actually mano a mano, as “y” is Spanish for “and.” So mano y mano means not “man to man,” but “man and man.”
No it doesn’t. It means “hand and hand,” as mano is Spanish for “hand,” not “man,” despite the phrase’s frequent use to mean “man to man” (I’m not sure of the author’s intended meaning in this quoted case, though). Mano traces back to Latin manus, which has given us such English words as manipulate (”handle by hand”), manufacture (”create by hand”) and “man-oh-man!” (”slap hand to forehead”). Just kidding about the last one.
By the by, urbandictionary.com notes about the misuse of this phrase:
Other variants include “mono y mono”, Spanish for
monkey and monkey = malapropism el mejor
So, we have a double misconception here. Or perhaps a triple one. After all, this flick is Iron Man—and not Iron Hand, and definitely not Iron Monkey, which is itself a darn good martial arts flick—about a superhero in a robot suit fighting a villain in a robot suit. Shouldn’t the phrase be “machino a machino”?
* “Soy Iron Mano”: Spanish for “I Am Iron Hand,” not sung by Black Sabbath.
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