In Colombia and Panama, there's an expression "Puro tilín, tilín y nada de paletas." It's maybe equivalent to "All talk and no action." Tilín is the sound the bell on a hand-pushed ice cream cart makes (in Colombia) and the expression translates to "Pure ding-a-ling, ding-a-ling and no ice cream." Paletas, as we who love Locopops know, are really ice pops on a stick. Another similar Colombian dicho is "Mucho ruido y pocas nueces" or "A lot of noise and no nuts." It's also the Spanish title for Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing.
Wandering around the web and in our office discussion, we arrived in Mexico and Cuba where they have a verb, cantinflear, that's similar. If you don't know about the Mexican actor Cantinflas, check him out on Wikipedia.
Among the things that endeared him to his public was his comic use of language in his films; his characters (all of which were really variations of the main "Cantinflas" persona but cast in different social roles and circumstances) would strike up a normal conversation and then complicate it to the point where no one understood what they were talking about. The Cantinflas character was particularly adept at obfuscating the conversation when he owed somebody money, was courting an attractive young woman, or was trying to talk his way out of trouble with authorities, whom he managed to humiliate without their even being able to tell. This manner of talking became known as Cantinfleada, and it became common parlance for Spanish speakers to say "¡estás cantinfleando!" (loosely translated as you're pulling a "Cantinflas!" or you're "Cantinflassing!") whenever someone became hard to understand in conversation. The Real Academia Española officially included the verb cantinflear, cantinflas, and cantinflada in its dictionary in 1992.
Imagine having a verb created from your name! (We have created "to google" recently.) Here's another quote that I love from the Wikipedia page.
In his biography of the comic, the scholar of Mexican culture Jeffrey M. Pilcher views Cantinflas as a metaphor for "the chaos of Mexican modernity", a modernity that was just out of reach for the majority of Mexicans: "His nonsense language eloquently expressed the contradictions of modernity as 'the palpitating moment of everything that wants to be that which it cannot be'." Likewise, "Social hierarchies, speech patterns, ethnic identities, and masculine forms of behavior all crumbled before his chaotic humor, to be reformulated in revolutionary new ways.
