When the matter of what to get for dinner comes up and Kass shrugs an “I don’t know,” what she really means is “ramen.” She’s a ramen girlie.
One time, when we were out chowing down ramen with a friend, Kass and the friend laughed about how they’re “rameras.”
“Wow,” I thought to myself. “I wish English had a fun word for ramen girlies.”
Later that year, Kass and I are in an airport, on our way to visit her sister in Texas. She’s slurping up ramen. I’m demolishing some chilaquiles (using chopsticks).
I snap a photo of Kass eating the ramen, throw it onto Instagram, and a friend comments: “kass eating noodles is my favorite thing ever.”
I innocently reply: “la ramera ✨”
She replies: “jajaja, kass, DILE ALGO!” — “hahaha, Kass, have a word with your husband!”
I smile the grin of a blithering, oblivious white man. “Such fun banter about my wife being a ramen addict,” my internal monologue chortled, naïvely chugging along aboard the train of thought.
A couple of days into the trip, we’re with Kass’ sister, catching up on chisme, and Kass mentions that I called her a ‘ramera’ in an Instagram comment. Her sister goes wide-eyed at me, laughs, and asks whether their parents saw the comment. My train of thought hits the brakes. I ask: “Wait, what does ramera mean?”
Turns out it’s slang for a sex worker (often derogatory, occasionally empowering, depending on context), lmao.
A few months pass, and we’re in a friend’s car in México City and Kass is telling her about the time I misconstrued a “ramen slut” pun as a cute family-friendly term for a noodle broth enjoyer, and our friend notes that in Spain, “ramera” means “T-Shirt” (you’d say ‘camiseta’ in México). We spend a moment theorising why — “maybe because a sex worker might remove their shirt?” was one terrible hypothesis — but it’s not the until the evening’s “Googling stuff on the toilet” session that I try to find an answer.
Well, ‘remera’ (with an ‘e’ in place of the first ‘a’) seems to be the most common word for T-Shirt in some South Americans countries, too (Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay). And some places in Spain actually say ‘camiseta’. There’s a third word — ‘playera’ — which, until that point, I’d assumed was a sleeveless T-Shirt (AKA tank top), but for some people it’s the other way around (playera has sleeves, camiseta doesn’t), and other people differ by collar vs. no collar (playera has no collar (to me, a T-Shirt), camiseta has a collar (to me, a Polo shirt)), whilst, to other folks (e.g. some people in Chile) ‘camiseta’ means ‘underwear’, and ‘playera’ refers to running shoes/trainers in some places.
It’s a linguistic cake you could probably cut a million different ways, right down to a person’s individual clothing choices. I’ve actively avoided ‘traditional’ ‘formalwear’ for most of my adult life, so ‘T-Shirt’ has just become ‘shirt’ to me, and ‘shirt’ has become ‘button-down’. There are, of course, some odd people who respect dress codes, say strange words like ‘dress shirt’ and ‘tuxedo’, and willingly spend time memorising different types of collar shapes and tie knots.
As if this rabbit hole didn’t already have enough tunnels, a ‘remera’ (or the masculine equivalent, ‘remero’) is a person who uses a rowing paddle (‘oar’ is ‘remo’ in Spanish). I don’t know why the feminine word for an oarsperson also became the word for T-Shirt. Maybe rowers were the first to use T-Shirts (a la the Polo shirt being popularised by polo players)?
Anyway, I needed to get off the toilet, so I stopped letting myself get distracted by gondoliers and started thinking about prostitutes again.
‘Remo’ for ‘oar’ took me back to the Latin ‘remus’ and the Proto-Indo-European ‘h₁reh’, meaning ‘to row’. ‘Ramera’, meanwhile, led to ‘ramo’ (Spanish for ‘bouquet’, as in a bouquet of flowers), then to the Latin ‘ramos’ for ‘branch’ or ‘limb’, and then to the Proto-Indo-European ‘wréh₂ds’ for ‘root’ (learning that the root word is ‘root’ was quite satisfying). As far as I can tell, ‘oar’ and ‘branch’ having similar-sounding origins might be one of those amazing language coincidences (like ‘much’ and ‘mucho’ being totally unrelated), though I could be wrong.
I did find an alleged answer for how ‘ramo’ (bouquet) became associated with sex workers, though (unless this is some kind of made-up folk etymology). In the Middle Ages, the doorways of brothels were apparently marked with bouquets of flowers. ‘Ramos’ for the bouquets of flowers on the brothels became ‘rameras’ (‘ramos’ + the suffix ‘era’ to form an occupation from a noun) in reference to the workers within.
I can’t promise you that’s really why folks in the 1400s started calling prostitutes ‘rameras’, but if you happen to reading this in the 2500s, I can absolutely assure you the reason you call ramen aficionados ‘rameras’ is because of a joke my wife made in 2023.