80 Battered Spanish, Eloquent Mixe: Form and Function of Mixe Difrasismos DANIEL F. SUSLAK Indiana University Abstract. One of the marks of a skillful speaker of Totontepecano Mixe is the ability to employ parallel couplets such as tùýk ýaaj tùýk joot ‘one mouth, one belly’ in a variety of discursive genres, ranging from prayer and political oratory to joking and storytelling. Comparable poetic forms, which Mesoamericanists refer to as difrasismos, are found in indigenous oral traditions across Mexico and Central America. This article examines the formal properties of Toton- tepecano difrasismos and explores the uses to which Totontepecanos put them, both formal and informal. 1. ‘One mouth, one stomach’. To speak tùýk ýaaj tùýk joot ‘one mouth, one stomach’ is to speak Totontepecano Mixe with the utmost sincerity. To use this type of poetic form appropriately is the mark of an eloquent speaker of this language. Couplets such as this are found in many Mesoamerican oral traditions and, following Garibay (e.g., 1953), Mesoamericanists generally refer to these parallel constructions as difrasismos. 1 Perhaps the best known English lan- guage publication on difrasismo is William Bright’s article “With One Lip, with Two Lips,” named after the line of verse in (1) from the 1524 Classical Nahuatl text called the Coloquios (Bright 1990:446). (1) Ca cententli, Indeed (with) one lip, Ontentli (with) two lips ic toconcuepa we reply, ic toconilochtia we return in ihiyo the breath, in itlatol the word in tloque, nahuaque of the Omnipresent One Like the Mixe phrase ‘one mouth, one belly’, the Classical Nahuatl phrase ‘with one lip, with two lips’ is a difrasismo that describes a particular manner of speaking. In this case, it means to speak indirectly. However, even given the metonymic association between mouths and speech, the relationship between the meanings of the constituent halves of this couplet and the meaning of the expression as a whole is somewhat opaque. One of the defining characteristics of difrasismo is that the meaning of the whole expression cannot be determined by simply adding its two halves together. Since 1996, I have recorded several dozen Mixe difrasismos. It is possible to create new ones, although in practice this rarely happens. Totontepecanos seemed to be much more appreciative of the artful deployment of a well-known