What About Vos?

Once vos denoted utmost formality. It was the “you” reserved for God, “thou.” Now vos is the equivalent of tú in Argentina, Uruguay, some areas of Colombia, the uplands of Ecuador and Central America.

Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges translated Julius Cesar’s exclamation of disbelief when he recognized Brutus among his assassins as ¡Ché, vos! [1] Che is an Argentine colloquialism for friend that doctor Ernesto Guevara popularized worldwide, making it a revolutionary symbol.

[1] Julius Cesar couldn’t have identified his assailants as assassins. The word didn’t arrive to Europe until the eleventh century. There was a murderous Ismaili sect in Syria, part of the Shiite branch of Islam, which fellow Syrians called 'hashish-takers.' From hashish or from the plural with the ending -in, Spanish got asesino and French assassin, which English borrowed in the fourteenth century. The term was applied to murderers irrespective of religious or Eastern connotations.