Running less spends less (Spanish idiomatic phrasing)
On traveling from Andalucia north to Extremadura (in Spain) at the beginning of Easter, the traffic advisory message panels all said:
Correr menos gasta menos.
I wondered what someone learning Spanish would make of this message - probably some gibberish like the title of this post. Anyway here's the explanation:
'Correr' when used referring to driving means 'to drive (very) fast'. 'Gastar' means 'spend (money)' but it is also used to mean 'consume (resources). In Spanish you can 'gastar luz' (use electricity), 'gastar mucha agua' (use a lot of water), and our topic for today 'gastar gasolina' (use gasoline / petrol). So with this information we can now translate the message to drivers on the roads of Spain as:
If you drive slower you'll use less gasoline / petrol.
It's a good thing they put it in Spanish since it wouldn't have fit on the boards in English. By the way, this is one of those somewhat rare examples where the Spanish is shorter than the English.
Brad
