In 2014, in Dr. Jen Nycz’s sociolinguistic variation class at Georgetown University, fellow PhD student Dan Simonson and I wrote a final project for the class together¹. The topic was the gendered distribution of two common Mexican Spanish slang phrases—“no mames” (roughly, ‘no shit’) and “no manches” (roughly, ‘no way’). “No mames” literally means “don’t suck me” (welcome to the wild world of Mexican slang) and “no manches” literally means “don’t stain me” (no comment). These are pervasive in Mexican Spanish and are used to express incredulity or surprise, either mock or genuine.

At the time, I thought maybe women used “no manches” more as a polite euphemism for “no mames”, and that men would be more likely to use “no mames”, which is perceived as more vulgar. I had the idea, based on my previous experience doing a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Michoacán, Mexico, and Dan had the tech savvy as a computational linguist-in training to carry it out using Twitter. So we scraped Twitter data and administered an online survey with a pathetic response rate. Jen was encouraging about our paper, so we presented it at NWAV in Chicago (where William Labov attended our talk, and possibly fell aslpeep!) and we then decided to try to publish it.

12 years later², the paper has been published in the journal Spanish in Context. In 2019, we went to Mexico City on a small grant from my post-grad school gig at Syracuse University and administered paper surveys at two Mexican universities and got about 200 responses. These responses conflicted significantly with our Twitter data, and Dan thought we should look at some other data sources.

So in this long and convoluted process, during the peak of the covid-19 pandemic/quarantine, we made the ill-advised attempt to add yet another data source to this paper. Trapped at home, we watched the black comedy-drama television Netflix series La Casa de las Flores (The House of Flowers) together and coded tokens of the two phrases every time they occurred. We wrote up the results to include in our paper.

After a recent round of peer review we decided to cut it out of the manuscript entirely. It made things overly complicated which I feared from the start. But we did write it and tried to submit it in one draft of the manuscript, so I am going to share the results here.

I now present the findings we cut from our manuscript, on the gendered distribution of “no mames” and “no manches” in the Netflix series La Casa de las Flores.

La Casa de las Flores Data

The analysis of telecinematic discourse, i.e. language use in TV series and films (Piazza et al., 2011), is on the rise in various linguistic sub-disciplines (Bednarek, 2019; Bednarek and Zago, 2022). As Bednarek (2019) writes, TV dialogue both constructs and reflects cultures and their ideologies. Furthermore, telecinematic discourse is generally more easily accessible to researchers interested in examining language use outside of their own immediate local surroundings. For these reasons, we chose to analyze such discourse.

La Casa de las Flores (Caro et al., 2018-2020) is a Mexican black comedy-drama television series created by director Manolo Caro for the television streaming service Netflix. The show was written by a team of seven writers, four of whom were women and three of whom were men. The series portrays an upper-class Mexican family that owns an upscale flower shop and a cabaret, both called ‘La Casa de las Flores’. It features LGBTQ lead characters and their storylines, although it has been criticized for not being as transgressive as it may seem (e.g., Smith, 2019, The problem with bisexuality in Netflix’s House of Flowers (La Casa de las Flores). For the present study, the authors viewed all three seasons of the series together and coded each token of “no mames” and “no manches” for individual speakers, addressees, and the performed gender thereof.

	“no mames”		“no manches”
Total Utterances	58		8
	Men	Women	Men	Women
Unique Speakers by Gender	35	23	0	8

Table 3. Raw counts of the two variants from the La Casa de las Flores.

As seen in table 3, there were 58 tokens of “no mames” and 8 of “no manches” in the show. All the “no manches” tokens were used by women characters. Male characters never used “no manches” in the show. In a step-down regression analysis containing speaker gender, addressee gender, and relationship between the speakers, speaker gender was found to be the sole significant predictor (p < 0.001). This is markedly different from every other context that we analyzed, where men did use “no manches”, albeit not with the same frequency as women. However, male characters in La Casa de las Flores used “no mames” 35 times, while women characters used it 23 times. Overall then, in this scripted series, “no mames” was by far the more common variant for all characters, being used more often by men than women. “No manches” was clearly associated with women in this series, never being uttered by a male character. These findings somewhat parallel the results of the Twitter data, where “no mames” was the more popular variant overall, with F-accounts using “no manches” more often than M-accounts (but still preferring “no mames”).”

Coda: There is yet another data source we also examined, wrote up results for, and then ultimately decided to cut from the manuscript. That would be Sociolinguistic Corpus of Mexico City. I might write that up for a future blog post.

References

Caro, M., Perskie, S., Córdova, M.J., Ley, R., Arredondo, M., Diego, A., Crawford, T. (Executive Producers) (2018 – 2020). La Casa de las Flores [TV Series]. Netflix; Noc Noc Cinema.

Bednarek, M. (2019). Creating dialogue for TV: Screenwriters talk television. Routledge.

Bednarek, M. & Zago, R. (2022). Bibliography of linguistic research on fictional (narrative, scripted) television series and films/movies, version 5 (March 2022). Available at https://unico.academia.edu/RaffaeleZago

Piazza, R., Bednarek, M., & Rossi, F. (Eds.). (2011). Telecinematic discourse: Approaches to the language of films and television series. John Benjamins Pub. Co.

Smith, P. J. (2019). Netflix’s The House of Flowers and the New Telenovela. Film Quarterly. University of California Press. 72(3): 59–61. https://doi:10.1525/FQ.2019.72.3.59

1. We were just good friends at the time. ↩︎
2. This is the duration of time we have been more than just good friends. ↩︎