There will be no entering the history of this place name, belonging to the long list of Spanish places with curious names that give to fill news from time to time (since Federico García Lorca visited to love, Parderrubias or elbows). In 2023, the City Council of Pájara asked the Royal Spanish Academy to include in its Dictionary the name of his town, so that whoever seeks bird And see that, in feminine, it is defined Bird as the momentary downturn of an athlete or the female of the partridge kept knowing that there is a Canarian people so called. It is not the first time that a request to the SAR is news based on the ignorance of the objectives and limits of a dictionary, but the mayor of Pájara, with a bit of “what’s of mine”, did not miss the opportunity to claim his municipality through the lexicographic route, and the thing, which we know, was there.
I remembered the anecdote of this Canarian place -name to the adjective thread Bird which appears in the allusion of the president of the Government to one of his ministers. I go to teachers Cristina Tabernero and Jesús María Usunáriz, based on Navarrese judicial lawsuits where complaints filed by injuries were settled. In its pages, the list of disqualifications is extensive and, I suppose that because there is distance from many years (they are complaints from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), I wake up a smile see that people could be insulting calling each other dragged, Boquochuerto, disbelgous, cows, rheumy, mundane o pantiernoamong others. It is terrible, on the other hand, to verify in those lawsuits the number of times that the religious, the racial or the national were worth insults, such as Judaazo, crucifier, French o Moriscado. It is not Bird In that list of insults. It is?
I will not overact and say that it is a denigrating and terrible thing that they call you Bird. But, probably without reaching the significant category of insult, it seems clear to me that it is not pleasant to be called bird o Bird. In it Dictionary of the RAE, the noun bird It has, in addition to the general meanings of the animal field, the figurative extension of being as adjective the way of calling “a cunning person and with very few scruples.” Sometimes dictionaries define meanings in a way that does not correspond to living social use, but I believe that this academic definition is avoided with the employment we currently give to bird as adjective. And no, it’s not praise for your boss.
I know that it is an assault on intimacy that is written for private consumption is disseminated to the public. I know there is no conversation of fumes that endures his exhibition without offending some nearby. And I know the context matters, of course. The bad thing that things have to be written (words fly Written remain The Latinos said: the words are taken by the wind, the writing remains) is that what in an oral talk is contextualized sympatically, put in writing charges another channel, so the most prudent in some positions is to let off steam talking and not writing. I understand everything, frame the circumstances, but call you Bird It is not pleasant.
The minister said has taken importance and treated him as the minor anecdote of an ancient conversation and alien to her; He has reduced the importance that can be given to this. He is in his freedom to do it if he considers it of his convenience: there are moments where it is better not to put the stick in Candela and we are already well served as a tension. But something that catches my attention for a long time is that they want to make us believe that I say it because of the matter of this adjective, what has surprised me most is that José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, asked on television about it, has said that he seems “an adjective, completely, quite fun”, and that he applies to someone “has to do with what is an intelligent person, list”.
I am not the one who assigns the meanings to words, no matter how much I dedicate myself to the language and philology, but the former president is not. It is the speaking society, and in it, at the moment, that they call you Bird It is not commendable or equivalent to being called line. And that’s why I write this article. Because if someone two weeks ago I thought that bird It is an insult and today thinks that it is a sympathetic and fun adjective, I think you have to measure the strength of your critical spirit and its level of equanimity, and value how much intellective capacity it gives us those who we listen to their words. Everyone rows from his boat to his shore, but let’s not reinterpret the words according to the ideological card of who says them. There cannot be two different meanings for a word, depending on whether the slip is our or the neighbor. That is not just not to understand what a dictionary is, but not understand what the language is, what is the social consensus that supports communication and how much is the responsibility of a citizen with a public voice in a democracy.
