Recently David Karr sat down with Melissa Guzman for a podcast to cover little bit of clarifications on the terms Ticos, Gringos and other political correctness in Costa Rica. You can take a listen here, but here is a quick read of the transcript.
We are back doing our second podcast today and I just wanted to talk today a little bit about a topic that you know I’ve had a lot of people kind of make comments and wanted to address. Whether for someone that’s traveling to Costa Rica or someone that’s maybe moving here living here something that I think a lot of a lot of foreigners and expats living in Costa Rica encounter and and that’s just kind of political correctness misconceptions and I think some people have.
I’ve got my my wife today with us, Melissa, she s Costa Rican and she can kind of give us some local inside to to some of this stuff that we’re going to talk about one of the main things that I wanted to address. In Costa Rica and especially in Jaco, you’ll hear Costa Ricans refer to Americans as gringos and sometimes I think there’s Americans feel that that is a derogatory name, that it is offensive and it is 100% not the case. So you can kind of give us a little bit more definition of what what is the true definition of the term gringo.
Melissa:
Hi everyone Gringos normally refers to somebody that is from the US or Canada. For us we can’t idenitfy if someone is from the US or Canada so they are all referred to gringos.
David: So Gringo is really any foreigner right.
Melissa: Basically any english speaking foreginer is referred to as Gringo. Somoen from London would be called a Gringo but if you speak French you would be referred to as French or Francis.
David: And for Costa Ricans, they are referred to as Ticos, is that offensive?
Melissa: Absolutely not, it is how we idenitify ourselves. In spanish you end words with ito to make the object smaller. Small would be chiquito, even smaller would be chiquitito, Costa Ricans used to incorrectly add ico at the end and thats were we got the nickname “Ticos”. But it is not offensive at all.
So there you go, some good background and info on using some the terms gringos and ticos when you are visiting Jaco Costa Rica.
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