A hearty Caribbean soup made with root vegetables and various meats — yuca, plantain, corn, chicken or beef — simmered low and slow. Sancocho is Sunday comfort food and celebration in a bowl.

A chaotic mix, a messy jumble where nothing makes sense and everything is tangled together. In Venezuela salcocho is disorder taken to its logical extreme.

All your belongings, personal stuff, everything you own packed up and ready to move. In Central America macundales is your entire portable life in bags and boxes.

A worthless person, the dregs, someone with no value or standing in the group. In Venezuela afrecho is the bran — the leftover waste — applied to a person who contributes nothing.