In the news recently has been the flap over a Nicaraguan Vice Minister of Foreign Relations [sic] (Manuel Coronel Kautz, the son of a famous Nicaraguan poet) calling the Netherlands a paisucho which was translated in English as "shitty little country". I'd never heard paisucho used in Spanish before, but before long I saw how to parse it: it's pais 'country' + -ucho. The latter is one of a small set of pejorative augmentative suffixes in the Romance languages. It is interesting that in Romance languages (as well as Slavic and Germanic ones), diminutives tend to be endearing. The opposite seems true of English where many things are described as adjective little nouns (e.g., crummy little book), while others are big old nouns. Can any of you think of counter-examples?

Ceci n'est pas un seing.