The Ultimate Spanish Phrase Finder is the book I had looked for in vain all my professional life, so I created it myself! I wanted to look up set phrases quickly, without having to construct them  word for word or waste time trying to fi nd them in non-alphabetized listings under the key words. I wanted to see synonymous phrases and expressions from literature and common word  pairings, and I wanted the phrases, where needed, to be illustrated with examples clarifying whether to use the verb ser or estar, the simple past or past continuous tense, and le, lo, or la as  object pronouns.
A phrase that can confound an English speaker translating into Spanish is, “Th at was delicious!” Do you use ser or estar, the preterite or imperfect? A Hispanic is most likely to say estaba  followed by buenísimo, riquísimo, delicioso, or sabroso. I also wanted a dictionary which would highlight diff erences in English and Spanish phraseology. For instance,“the winds of change” is  rendered in Spanish “the winds of the change,” los vientos del cambio. I also wanted to fi nd the range of phrases possible in a situation. “And here I am today” is y hasta hoy or y aquí estoy yo.  By looking up either, you will fi nd the other.
To illustrate the usefulness of the Phrase Finder, the following are a few examples of phrases that are diffi cult to construct using a conventional dictionary: “for the sole purpose of” con el único  propósito de, “take as much time as you need” tómate todo el tiempo que necesites, “she told me what to do” ella me dijo qué hacer or ella me dijo lo que (yo) tenía que hacer, “she’s casting  sidelong glances at me” or “she keeps looking at me out of the corner of her eye” me está echando miradas de reojo, “may I have a drink of water?” ¿me das agua? or ¿me regalas agua?, “to  walk back” (return on foot) regresar(se) caminando or, in Spain, volver(se) andando, “I’ll walk back home” me regreso a casa caminando or me vuelvo a casa andando. Th e Mexican students  ask the North American teacher where he is from. Innocently he replies, “I have two homes. I’m from California but I’ve lived for many years in New York.” Th e class chuckles because the  students have interpreted “I have two homes” as tengo dos casas, which implies that the teacher has both a wife and a mistress. A phrase dictionary is the ideal vehicle for clarifying these  ambiguities.

I also wanted a dictionary that permitted me to subvocalize a phrase (hear it in the mind) because I believe that our mental dictionaries are “alphabetized” by sound and that, as a result, we  spontaneously subvocalize phrases when acquiring them. Hence I avoided abbreviations. And I wanted a dictionary, not a smattering of idioms.

The concept of The Ultimate Spanish Phrase Finder first came to me many years ago when I was taking third-year Spanish at Patrick Henry High School in Roanoke, Virginia, studying under an excellent teacher, Martha Miriam Bowman. We read, among other things, José by Armando Palacio Valdés. I found that my dictionaries did not clarify many of the  difficult phrases in this  work. Word dictionaries offer almost no phrase coverage for the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Horacio Quiroga, Benito Pérez Galdós, and scores of other important authors that college students  must read. I wanted the Phrase Finder to be a supporting text for the reading of literature. Some word dictionaries have complex systems of notations such as asterisks and clusters of asterisks,  daggers, and other symbols to indicate that a phrase might be used by a family at the dinner table but not in more formal speech, that the word is mildly or grossly off-color, and so  on. The Phrase Finder avoids excessive notation because if the phrases are parallel, most notations are superfluous. “To have a growth spurt” is crecer rápidamente or aumentar de estatura,  but “to shoot up like a weed” is dar un estirón or, in Spain, pegar un estirón. A student hearing si en el  caso de que will connect it to “(if) in the event that” but might miss another important  equivalence, “whether, if,” as in “The interviewer asked the applicant whether, if they offered her the job, she would be willing to relocate.”

Linguists distinguish between descrip tive and prescriptive grammar. Descriptive grammar accepts as correct any understand- able utterance, including words like “gotta,” “wanna,” and “ain’t.” In  descriptive grammar, “loan” can be a noun or a verb. To a prescriptive grammarian, however, “would you loan me a dollar?” is bad grammar. “Would you lend me a dollar?” is the correct  form. Although I side with the descriptive grammarians in principle, the Phrase Finder is prescriptive. Many people nowadays say, “If I would have had time, I would have gone.” Th is sentence  loses the important distinction between the conditional and the subjunctive. Th e more logical expression is, “if I had had time, I would have gone” or even “had I had time, I would have gone.”  Spanish speakers make a similar mistake when they say, si lo probabas te gustaría instead of the more logical si lo probaras te gustaría. I believe that Hispanic universities want their English  professors to teach the best English usage and stylistics, and universities in English-speaking countries want their Spanish professors to do likewise. Th e Phrase Finder provides the best  usage and stylistics in both languages.