“Chapado a la antigua / anticuado / estar cerrado

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• Meaning

A person who avoids adventurous activities, who sticks to their old beliefs, passtimes and routinary traditional lifestyle.

• Origin

This idiom was coined in the 1700´s to refer to those people who feel comfortable with their traditional old beliefs and creedence and would hardly ever accept new ideas, take risks or change even a single thing from their traditional old-fashioned way of life. If we took a cane of any other similar thing and stuck it into the mud, when the latter is still wet, it would easily be removed. But what if the mud dried? It would be really difficult to remove the stick. The same happens to those who stick to their own old-fashioned ideas. It would absolutely be hard. It would take a  tremendous effort to convince them to stay apart from their own ideas and lifestyles.

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• Example

-What happened to you? You look as if you had seen the death!

-Not exactly but almost there. The thing is that my parents are going on vacation to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary.

-And? What´s the problem with that?

-The problem is that they have asked my grandmother to stay with us to supposedly take care of us. It will be horrible.

-Why? She is a lovely person.

-You don´t know her. She wants us not to watch TV or play videogames. She asks us to go to bed at 8pm and to top it off, she wants us to go to church with her every single afternoon. She is so horrible.

-Have you ever tried to talk to her and convince her to change her manners?

-Hundreds! Thousands of times! But she would never listen to us. She is just a stick-in-the-mud!

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