Talking smack in Mexico can get complicated, but few words are more commonly heard and harder to totally comprehend than Wey. It’s heard everywhere and used for everything, ranging from insult to affection to merely an exclamation of surprise. What it means is a lot harder to suss out, and gets harder the more you know about it. It starts out as the simple word buey, meaning an ox or steer. Like a lot of Mexican insults, it can be taken at that simple barnyard level, like we used to say somebody was a dummox back in more innocent times. There’s a Mexican joke that asks what five animals every woman needs. The answer is: a Jaguar in the carport, a mink in the closet, a “gata” (female cat, but crude term for a maid) in the kitchen, a tiger in the bedroom—and a buey to pay for it all. The dumb husband, maybe equivalent to our use of “jackass”. Innocent enough. But then you take the same word and pronounce it guey and it gets nasty. You don’t use that word in nice company, and you rarely see it printed in public places. Risque baseball caps use a little picture or a longhorn’s head to stand in for it. So it’s still the same word, the same referent, but now it’s naughty. That might seem a little weird, but is it. What is the difference between the English words “mother” and “muthah”.

Same word, different weight. Why? Well, what do we know about oxen other than they’re dumb? Well, for one thing, they’re castrated. That’s bad enough in a macho culture, but they also wear horns, which has the cryptomeaning of cuckold. But mostly, it’s just a dirty word. On top of that, there’s wey, a sort of generic version that is used across the board. The greeting ¿Que Onda, Wey? is so automatic in Mexico that one friend told me she’d lived here for two years before she realized that it wasn’t one word, kayondaway. ¿Que me miras, wey? (what you looking at, turkey?) is aggressive, but most pals would use the word to invite a friend for a drink. It’s also used non-personally; somebody drops a glass and yelps, ¡Ay, wey! So what are we left with here? A word of multiple use and interpretation. You can interpret it according to the tone you hear it in. (If somebody honks at you in traffic and yells, ¡Quidado, wey! you can assume he’s not being ironically affectionate.)You can use it yourself and learn by trial an error when it gets smiles and when it gets your nalgas kicked. But it’s not a word that will go away if ignored. In Mexico, you might say, there’s the right way, the wrong way, and the Que Onda wey.