Pibe → urchin?
David Lobina writes:
In the context of Diego Maradona's recent passing, I have been struck by how often he's been referred to as a 'street urchin' in the British press in the last 24 hours or so, and not only because the term sounds rather old-fashioned to me. One (nice) article from The Guardian is rather representative, as the author quotes a 1928 article from an Argentinian periodical on the footballing skills of Buenos Aires street children that uses the word 'pibe' to refer to these children, a word that usually refers to young people in general (at least according to the DRAE). In fact, I would say the reader understands that the author is talking about street children because of the context rather than from any particular word.
Anyway, what I find most curious about this is that the Guardian article glosses the word 'pibe' as 'urchin', which is not entirely correct, and many other newspapers in the UK seem to have run with this epithet for Maradona.
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