Mexico, 2019: what ahorita really means
I arrived in Mexico already fluent in Spanish, which is a good way to be humbled. The grammar was mine. The country was not.
The first thing that caught me out was ¿Mande? I was used to ¿Qué? or ¿Cómo? Here, when someone hasn't heard you, they say ¿Mande? — softer, older, and used constantly. It took me two days to stop hearing it as a question I had failed to understand.
The second was ahorita. It looks like a diminutive of ahora — now, but smaller, so surely sooner. It is not. Ahorita can mean five minutes, this afternoon, or a polite never. Nobody is lying to you. The word simply carries an entire cultural attitude to time inside it, and reading which ahorita you have just been handed is a skill.
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