Había tanto caos en la casa que cuando llegó más familia, fue como si éramos pocos y parió la abuela.

Sentence Discussions Spanish
#1
English Translation

There was so much chaos in the house that when more family arrived, it was like adding insult to injury.

éramos pocos y parió la, o mi, abuela

expr. irón. coloq. U. para dar a entender que aumenta de modo inoportuno el número de personas presentes en un lugar, o el de dificultades existentes.

https://dle.rae.es/abuelo#FzBAkj9

This is a funny idiom, but I think the sample sentence should say “como si fuéramos”.

#2

I’ll preface this by saying it’s not an idiom I really use.
It’s strange, on the one side, I agree that it should be “fuéramos”, but then, it should also be “pariese”, in my opinion, and maybe change fue by era (then the sentence would be “Había tanto caos en la casa que cuando llegó más familia, era como si fuéramos pocos y pariese la abuela.”). But I feel that, by changing it that much, the sentence gets really convoluted and the idiom gets lost.

So maybe, if I were to use it, I would simplify it along the lines of:
Había mucho caos en casa y todavía llegó más familia. Éramos pocos y parió la abuela, vaya

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#3

I didn’t think that far. Good catch! :+1: Any particular reason you would say pariese and not pariera?; the former arguably sounds better but I believe the forms are equivalent.

That sounds good to me, for what it’s worth.

#4

These are the two form of the verb in the past subjunctive. I believe they exist because they used to show a difference in formality (like tú and usted) but nowadays they are interchangeable. So use whichever you like the most (or remember more easily) :slight_smile:

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edit: apprently it’s not a matter of formality, but that each form comes from a different latin origin.

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