Morning Show contributor Nico Adjemian takes a huge amount of pride in his Hispanic heritage. This confuses a lot of people because Nico has A.) the pastiest complexion of any human and, B.) an Armenian last name.
For Cinco de Mayo we decided to put our Mexican bona fides on display. Here’s how the Tortilla Slap Cinco de Mayo challenge went down. First, the holiday themed trivia portion:
Round Two was the Spanish Translation challenge. We each came up with our favorite Spanish words (based on how funny they sound) and the other person had to translate into English. There was a huge controversy over one of the words that Nico missed. This will be addressed further after the video:
So, there was some disagreement over the word “Gringo”. The colloquialism is usually used to denote “foreigner”, “stranger” or, more specifically “a person from an English-speaking country who doesn’t understand the Spanish language or the customs of the country”.
The version of that word’s origin that I had always heard was that “gringo” comes from the Spanish word “Griego” which means “Greek” in Spanish. This was challenged by Brandon because he couldn’t find it on-line anywhere.
The most likely theory is that it originates from griego ('Greek'), used in the same way as the English phrase "it's Greek to me".
Also, if you’re looking for a more established etymology than “Wikipedia” that meaning is also mentioned in a 200+ year-old Spanish dictionary:
The 1817 Nuevo diccionario francés-español,[b] for example, gives gringo and griego as synonyms in this context:
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