‘Pedo’ (with the ‘ped’ pronounced a la ‘pedal’) is Spanish for ‘fart’. That’s it. That’s the end of this entry.
Except it isn’t, because it also means… ‘party’, and ‘drunk’, and ‘annoying’, and ‘what’s up?’, and ‘really?!’ — the list goes on.
I learned the ‘que pedo’ usage first, before knowing ‘pedo’ meant ‘fart’. I knew ‘¿que?’ meant ‘what?’, so I just figured ‘pedo’ somehow meant ‘up’, like, ‘what’s up?’
A little while later, I clocked that ‘pedo’ was also being used in reference to parties. My assumption was: ‘que pedo?’ (‘what’s up?’) had been warped to mean ‘a thing that is happening’ — there’s some logic there, right…?
The truth is far more beautiful. ‘Pedo’ in the context of ‘party’ first came to mean ‘drunk’. I don’t really know why. Maybe because drunks and farts are both a bit disgusting but also occasionally comedic?
But wait, here’s the best part. You know how the Spanish language has ‘genders’, yeah? ‘El’ is the masculine singular for ‘the’, and ‘la’ is the feminine singular. Well, ‘party’ in Spanish is a ‘feminine’ noun: ‘fiesta’.
So ‘the party’ would be ‘la fiesta’.
But ‘pedo’ is masculine — ‘el pedo’.
What’s happened is, ‘el pedo’ has flipped into ‘la peda’. The fart said “fuck your gender norms” so it could join the party.
That’s just about the peak of this whole ‘pedo’ thing, but there’re loads more. ‘¡Ni de pedo!’ for ‘no way!’, ‘buen pedo’ for ‘friendly’, ‘ni pedo’ for a dismissive sort of ‘well, tough, deal with it’.
I’ve asked a lot of people how ‘fart’ became so linguistically omnipresent, but nobody really seems to know, and translators apps often struggle to keep up. You’ll click the Translate button on a tweet and it’ll convert everything except ‘pedo’ into near-perfect English, so you’ll just have a totally normal sentence with ‘fart’ in the middle.