"Cincha rabiña, that I have a pineapple, that has pine nuts and you don't eat them" There are many childish paremias that we continue to use with a certain sarcasm even when we already comb our gray hair. "Whoever went to Seville, he lost his chair". They are puns that the little ones (and not so little ones) use as a kind of spell. "Bounce, bounce and in your ass it explodes." One of the most popular expressions in this children's catalog is "Santa Rita, Rita, what is given cannot be taken away". Let's see its origin and meaning.
"Santa Rita, Rita, what is given is not taken away" is a locution used to refuse to return something that has been previously given or given away. It is what a person (usually a child) blurts out to another who had given him something and later regretted his generosity.
The Santa Rita that is appealed to is Santa Rita de Casia, whose day in the saints is May 22. Born in 1381 in Cascia, a town located in central Italy, she was an obedient daughter, faithful wife, abused wife, mother, widow, religious, stigmatized and incorrupt saint, according to the Catholic agency Aciprensa.
Santa Rita is known above all for being the saint of impossible cases, after hopeless situations have been miraculously resolved thanks to her intercession. Precisely, the origin of the expression "what is given is not taken away" has to do with one of her legends.
They say that once upon a time there was a very unattractive but very devoted young woman who entrusted herself to Santa Rita de Casia to find a boyfriend. The saint worked the miracle and the girl found a partner, but he broke off the relationship shortly before getting married. The girl turned to the saint again to tell her the popular "Santa Rita, what is given cannot be taken away." However, as the journalist and sociologist Gregorio Doval recalls in his book From the fact to the saying, "the maiden did not get this new favor and she had to remain single, with no other choice than to stay to dress saints."
Despite the legend, the philologist Alberto Buitrago, author of the Dictionary of sayings and set phrases. 5,000 different sayings and phrases and 3,000 variants of them, maintains that the appearance of the expression of Santa Rita "does not seem to obey any other reason than rhyme", as it happens with other locutions such as "For the sake of interest, I love you, Andrés "; "Put the brakes on, Magdaleno!" or "Where does Vicente go?...Where do the people go?"
Although today the phrase is "Santa Rita, Rita, what is given is not taken away", formerly there was a somewhat longer version: "Santa Rita the blessed, what is given is not taken away; if you give me, to heaven and if you take me away, to hell."
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
