• oni ᓚᘏᗢ@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    In spanish. It’s a word that people started to say suddenly from one moment to another. “Eso está bien de nicho”, “es que no estoy en ese nicho”, “esa película es de nicho”. To me it’s a flamboyant word just to say that something is not so popular.

    • Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      How interesting. Now I have to ask some Spanish-speaking friends what they think of it.

      I can imagine the usage being annoying in one language, but benign in another. In English, “niche” is also an ecological term. It refers to the role and place of an organism inside of its ecosystem. Like, “Spiders fill the niche of fly-eater,” or “An invasive species can adapt to the niche of a native species, and thus endanger the native species’s survival.” I’m a nerd and it’s the first thing I think of when I hear “niche.”

      I do speak Spanish, but I’m not immersed enough to know if that meaning carries over?

      • oni ᓚᘏᗢ@lemmy.world
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        19 hours ago

        I do not know from where this word “nicho” came from. The word exist in spanish, but it doesn’t have that meaning of “not so popular” as I said before. You can check the RAE for the definition. People use the words because they heard it in one context and associate that context to the word, they forget to ask what that word means just to not look dumb or something. Where I’ve heard this word the most is when I talk with people that is related with art, let’s say, cultural managers.

        I do not overlook too much which words people use and say to myself “the buzz word is this one now huh?”, for example, the buzzword this last week in spanish, IMO, is “verborrea” (it means that people start to talk nonsense, and can’t controll it because is a language disorder), word that people obiously use wrong, the correct word that they want to use is “perorata” (when you talk, talk, and talk but do not add nothing of value to the topic).

        • Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world
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          19 hours ago

          That’s fascinating. I can imagine “verborrea” being a portmanteau (which refers to “a word that combines the form and meaning of two or more other words.” I know it’s not a common word and that Google Translate doesn’t translate the literary term, so I figured I’d clarify what I mean.) I think this because I’ve heard “verbal diarrhea” as a phrase in English before, referring to the same phenomenon.

          Okay, I looked it up (sitio en español). It isn’t specifically related to “diarrhea,” but it does take the ending from the same Latin (and therefore Greek) root, as a reference to something flowing or gushing. I couldn’t say which phrase came first, but it’s possible they both arose independently.