The good use of language
"We change when we see changes," said Santiago Muñoz Machado , director of the Royal Academy of Spain ( RAE ), the institution with more than three hundred years of existence ensuring the unity and structural logic of the Spanish language, during his recent visit to Buenos Aires.
The construction of that sentence is curious and interesting. The verb "note" For a long time, it was commonly used in conversations and written texts by Argentinians. However, it was only after the 1980s that the Academy legitimized this Frenchified verb in its records, incorporating it into its dictionary. Until then, it was considered a Gallicism, the use of which was refrained from by institutions like this newspaper, bound by a basic criterion to what the teachers and custodians of the language had said in Madrid. For a quarter of a century, the RAE has worked together with other language academies to preserve this great cultural heritage.
It took a long time, too, until our editors and proofreaders admitted that if something had gone unnoticed or unnoticed, it was because it had been “unnoticed” . "Unnoticed," in the old usage of the language, was not synonymous with unnoticed as it is today; it meant having left an act worthy of punishment unpunished: unnoticed, to go unnoticed for one's actions or deeds.
In such examples, among many others that the newspaper's oldest readers may recall, one perceives the natural mobility of language, its dynamism, its state of constant gestation, with modifications that resonate deeply within society. Language is a collective creativity in which discrimination has no place, as people of all ages, from all social, cultural, or professional levels, can contribute to a lexicographic wealth that has now reached 94,000 words and 191,000 meanings.
It's a slow and repetitive task that culminates when a word demonstrates that it has fully met the two conditions that will open the doors to the dictionary shared equally in the 23 countries that have Spanish as their mother tongue. Other languages lack the ability to communicate to those who speak and write them as Spanish does.
An essential condition for the academies to achieve legitimacy is that the word be used for a sufficiently long time, as proof that it has not been a seasonal whim somewhere; the other is that it be integrated into the vocabulary of the population in a geographical space that can somehow be measured. Therein lies the voice "kid" , originating from the Genoese dialect, which the RAE records as being rooted in the speech of the River Plate people; that is, among Argentines and Uruguayans, and therefore in an area characterized by the unquestionable cultural influence of Italian immigration.
Language, Santiago Muñoz Machado has said, is what unites us most as a people.
Thus, Muñoz Machado could well have said that changes in the administration of the common language entrusted to the institution under his charge occur when, based on colloquial testimony or what is written, RAE researchers conclude that there has been a change due to the constant use of a new word, how it is used, and in what context.
During the last military government, an official authority of the province of Córdoba had banned the word "vector" , whose first meaning, according to the RAE dictionary, corresponds, in technical terms, to the agent who transports something from one place to another. As a "vector," it had been identified with some regularity in documentation of the insurrectionary movements of the time, and was banned. It was a scandal: from this very newspaper, so alienated and opposed to the terrorism of the time, a call was made for the sanity of the provincial officials. To put it in the words of Muñoz Machado, generally applied to the absurd manipulation of language: “Public power cannot impose ways of speaking” .
“Vector,” as was only natural, soon regained its legal status among the Spanish speakers of Córdoba.
The RAE (Spanish Royal Academy of Spanish Language) has contributed greatly, in its teaching role regarding speech, to clipping the modest wings of those who in recent decades sought to take the woke trend regarding gender issues to the extreme. It already sounds like an annoying remnant of a recent and delirious past to have attempted to soften supposedly sexist forms and thus nullify some generic masculine forms by eliminating the "e" and arrogantly replacing it with an "x" or an "@" that is impossible to vocalize.
Language, Muñoz Machado has said, is what unites us most as a people. We must therefore cherish this intangible but enormously valuable asset that links us to the more than five hundred million Spanish speakers around the world and thus enhances our knowledge and productions through the synergy between the skills of Spanish speakers scattered across the planet.
Academics don't create the language. If anything, they give it prestige with their authority. In this area, in truth, we all have contributions to make, whether by action or omission. The director of the RAE, it's unfortunate to say, left Argentina with the strange feeling that the thing he received the most questions about here was swear words. It sounded very strange to him.
Will we all make a civic effort to use our common language for understanding and discussion, engaging in cordial terms, rather than wielding it as a weapon that tends to harm those who don't think like us?
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