Embrujado

Okay, I guess I'm reading El embrujo de Shanghai after all. I jumped around for a bit, now I've gone back to beginning and begun reading it straight through, which gives me a chance to speed-read the parts I'd struggled through already and look up interesting new words. With few exceptions, I don't actually need to translate these in order to get the gist of the passages where they're found, but I want to. I find I'm really loving Marsé's diction (¡Por fin, un autor leísta!) and whose life isn't more enriched by learning some Barcelona slang of the 40s?

So far the most interesting word I've come across is tebeo which my sources translate as "(children's) comic". But Wiktionary/Wikipedia goes much further, telling me:

[The title of the Spanish comics digest] TBO is pronounced in Spanish almost the same as "te veo", "I see you". It was so popular that tebeo is now a generic word for "comic book" in Spain.

Neat! Trinxa, representing one of the few instances of Catalan code-switching so far, is a runner-up. The basic meaning seems to be "waistline", but in context ("esa padilla de trinxes") it's a shortening of trinxeraire "street urchin". (The explanation in the DLC is that a trinxeraire is one that sleeps in a trinxera or "trench".)