If you're a hitchhiker, you know that a towel is the one most useful to have while you're traveling.

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the
subject of towels.


A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an
interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value -
you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons
of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches
of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it
beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon;
use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use
in hand-tohand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes
or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a
mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't
see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in
emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it
if it still seems to be clean enough.


More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some
reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker
has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in
possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask,
compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit
etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker
any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might
accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who
can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it,
struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his
towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.


Hence a phrase which has passed into hitch hiking slang, as in "Hey,
you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where
his towel is." (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy:
really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)


Nestling quietly on top of the towel in Ford Prefect's satchel, the
Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic began to wink more quickly. Miles above the surface
of the planet the huge yellow somethings began to fan out. At Jodrell
Bank, someone decided it was time for a nice relaxing cup of tea.


"You got a towel with you?" said Ford Prefect suddenly to Arthur.

In Panamanian slang, however, "giving someone a towel" means bribing them. This is always another danger when you are in a foreign culture. Translating word for word often brings unexpectedly funny double meanings. 

While Dumas was moving our stuff from point a to point b, we were discussing some of the idiomatic expressions which have developed in Panamanian Spanish since the US had been here so long. Here are the two best ones (in my opinion).

A camarón (literally, "shrimp") is a small job someone does on the side, out of the line of their ordinary occupation. Supposedly this came into being by Gringos asking Panamanians to "come around" and do a job for them. Since Spanish speakers don't like to say consonant clusters at the ends of words, and all of the subtle English vowel sounds get rounded off to the nearest one in the Spanish five, "come around" got turned into camarón.

There is a place near Ciudad Panamá called Arraijan. It's on the right-hand side of the road as you leave the city. Yes, you guessed it, "right hand" turned into Arraijan. The J (jota) in Spanish is a strong guttural aspirate resembling the English H sound, and again the final D dropped off. Just for fun I googled this (I know, I know, but people do say that now) and found this page, which verifies the words.

I also told Dumas about my impressions of horn honking. He told me that one time he was in the ex-Canal Zone, and honked his horn without thinking, which he knew was forbidden. He was immediately arrested and detained by a passing military officer. The MPs gave him a lecture about how honking was rude, bad for your hearing, and illegal in the Canal Zone. They ran a record check on him and detained him for more than a half an hour. He said fortunately his record was clean, not even a parking ticket. The MP told him that if there had been anything on his record, they would have taken his driver's license away from him. Foreign military police inside your own country is a strange way to experience culture shock. Needless to say, Panamanian traffic cops are much less strict about this.