Noises and sounds

Sound words are the area where a foreign language stays approximate longest: a learner says <em>hacer ruido</em> where a native speaker says crujir, chirriar or zumbar. The difference is not style but information — a gate that <em>chirría</em> needs oil, a gate that <em>cruje</em> is rotten. The word to carry away is el rumor, in el rumor de la calle. It looks like « rumour » and its first sense is the other one: in Spanish el rumor is a low continuous sound — traffic, a river, many people talking at a distance. It carries the hearsay sense too, in corre el rumor de que…, but English kept only that second job. So « the rumour of the street » is a sentence about gossip, and el rumor de la calle is a sentence about the window being open.