April 25th is Saint Mark's Day, one of the most cherished festivities for lovers of consuming gastropod mollusks, generally known as snails. As the popular saying goes, “he who eats snails for Saint Mark's Day enjoys good health for free” and it is customary to eat them on this day. Some say that eating snails for Saint Mark's Day prevents being touched, that is, falling ill in one way or another. My great-grandmother used to eat one raw every year and she did well, until she was 93. In my town, they don't have snail feasts for Saint Mark's Day, but rather they are typical for the Cross, on May 3rd, a little later. This day is a big celebration in the Camarata neighborhood, and all the locals who have at least one leg go down to eat snails with family and friends.

One of the headlines that always appears at the start of the new year is about first births. The lucky parents, with their newborn in their arms, usually answer the same question: what name? And it's true that a name is a linguistic element, a simple word, that seems to become ingrained in our DNA. Some people believe that names can be linked to a person's personality: "Marias are calm, Juans are energetic." Due to a lack of evidence, however, we will limit ourselves to discussing names from a (socio)linguistic point of view.

You've probably encountered a friend from another town who doesn't say things the way you do. It's not that they use strange words or pronounce things very differently from yours, but something about them sounds different. One of the possible reasons why your neighbor speaks differently could be the air conditioning. This phenomenon consists of pronouncing words like 'profit', 'rabbit', 'fucked' as 'prufito', 'knife' and 'harvested'. That is, to make the 'o' followed by 'i' be pronounced as a 'u'. Thus, speakers who do this pronounce 'mulino', 'cusí', 'bucí', 'prufito' and even, 'communion', 'cumu' and 'turtle', unlike those who pronounce everything with an 'o'.