Communication: linguistics requires speaking

“I wouldn’t dare say that there is bad communication, that there is some over there: what I feel is that our communication tools are very weak in the face of those who are in conflict. I speak and they have a capacity to shout a thousand times more than mine, “the president said this week, and with good reason. It was his way of recognizing one of the main problems in his management.

Although many still don’t realize it, what is already known around the world as GAFAM (the Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft agreement) is operating in an increasingly authoritarian manner, as evidenced by modifications that they impose on each of these resources which were supposed to be created to facilitate human relations. In each of them, control and manipulation are more and more visible. And it is in this context that the government’s communication policy is worrying.

And also from certain so-called politically linked media, which last and spend a lot of time with suspicion on proto-fascist demonstrations and deplorable characters who have raised macrismo or spend hours editorializing against them, but in reality giving them political vitality which they miss and which they take advantage of to distill hatred of the opposition.

The above, of course, has to do with a claim reiterated in this column: There is an urgent need to restore TDA (Open Digital Television), which was one of the greatest communicational achievements of the CFK government and which since 2016, the macrismo has frozen and seriously spoiled. Without denying the importance of the recent announcement of the Universal Compulsory Basic Benefit (SEB) for mobile communications services, fixed telephony, Internet connection and subscription TV for the benefit of 10 million low-income people – and this is the continuity of the decree that in August, these public services were declared essential -, this does not replace the importance of TDA, which is an absolutely free high definition network which rendered an extraordinary service between 2009 and 2015, reaching 10 million households in the 23 provinces, for example nearly 40 million people. And this has also fostered thousands of jobs in the Fuegian television factories.

All this is not only important with regard to the informative content, but also for linguistic recovery in Argentinian communications, which is already imperative. And that very little cares about, being that it’s one of the most subtle losses we suffer as a society, and with a very serious outlook for the future.

And the point is that the colloquial Argentine language is already in a very serious emergency, as the enormous writer Juan Filloy warned over 30 years ago. Who argued that “if we have a language of 70,000 words, why are we going to use basic Spanish of 800? The people of Argentina only speak 800 to 1,200 words”. If this poverty scared him because it was all the familiar language of Argentines in the mid-1980s, when Spanish now has nearly a hundred thousand words, everything has gotten worse. And even more so with the linguistic colonization from which we are suffering and which has naturalized the use and abuse of technological anglicisms. The examples are overwhelming, like the substitution of the verb silence by “mute”, “link” for the link or the link, or “loging” replacing login, registration or installation.

And not to mention the invasion and naturalization – this, more perverse – of the economist language which has supplanted the political and legal language, which is what determines all legality. The effects of this situation were and are deadly for a society like ours, which has been deceived a thousand times starting with the word “debt”, which has been imposed on us as an absolute mandate, to the point that it is today impossible to distinguish whether a debt is legitimate or illegitimate because it has been enshrined as an “unavoidable obligation”.

As noted by the eminent jurist, former federal judge and constitutionalist of Cordoba Miguel Rodríguez Villafañe, the concept of “honoring the debt” is repeated as absolute and necessary, but without analyzing whether the debt is legitimate or not. Because “honor” means respect and reverence, a concept which does not correspond doubtfully legal and usurious impositions. That these are, in their turn and properly speaking, the so-called “debts”. that is how the “foreign debt” is a favorable right and without appeal of the powerful. That when they are uncomfortable with the Constitution or the law, they impose what RV calls “unacceptable guarantees”. And it is that always “the external indebtedness in an illegitimate, illegal and odious manner of the country was accompanied by actions which facilitated the trap and the undue”.

What was a strategy of concealment, disinformation and manipulation based, among other reasons, on “neocolonial modalities applied to the legal and the use of words”. Thus, he argues, the “creditor” is one who “has the right to demand that an obligation be fulfilled”, but should not be legitimized by asking for it. And yet, when it comes to “external debts”, we are still unable to question the legitimacy.

And even the catch is in the installation of the idea of ​​”to honor the debt”. To honor is to respect, exalt or reward someone’s merit, to give honor or fame. From where the so-called obligation to “honor” debts is a common and widespread scam. When meanings are distorted, not only is legitimacy denied, but the enthronement to “honor” establishes apart from that the debts should to be paid unachievable. In other words, as they are “declared” by the “creditors”, who in turn are in fact usurers. People or institutions, like the IMF or international banks.

The Cordoba jurist, pointed and remarkable, maintains that it is “a true legal colonialism” which “disturbs the essential reasoning in matters of rights”, since the national Constitution clearly makes the difference between “guarantees” and “rights”. That they are not equal concepts “in no case can a guarantee be used to guarantee anti-human rights” as is the case with external debts which “force vulture funds to pay, for example, simply because ‘it is to respect what has been agreed, even if it is hateful or illegitimate and has serious consequences for the population. “A simple guarantee can never violate basic human rights, and a law or a sentence cannot not validate it either, since all this is null and void. ”

Rodríguez Villafañe maintains What never speak of “external lenders”, but of “external creditors”. This is also, purely and simply, a linguistic abuse because it implies from the outset assuming that we are “debtors” of so-called debts which are never audited before being accepted. That’s why it turns out that those of us who always demand audits of external engagements specify if in fact you owe what you claimman–- We are annoying for the powers that be: companies, bankers, the media. With what, beyond the efforts of well-intentioned economists – and even patriotic, which also exists -, the misuse of the Spanish language always leaves us naked and uncovered.

Linguistic neocolonization has imposed itself in all dissemination media, without the vast majority of communicators realizing it. Today, the use of abstruse words or sentences is daily and they are schooled by the population, who repeat them without realizing it.

This is why we always fall into the authoritarian “reverential respect” for which to lenders never rights are claimed, otherwise what “Indulgence is only requested for obligations that may have been breached“.

And all of this makes people believe that they have received benefits, when in reality these were abuses for which they should first and foremost be grateful. And they validate the evil economists who not only misinform, but also misinform and distort in fake media and trash TV.

Another loophole arises when the national budget is discussed and the forecast of external debt payments are called “debt service payments”. to top it off, they are conceptualized as ‘services’, whereas no debt does no ‘service’.

For decades we have heard bogus economists (and naïve politicians playing the game) say that “to shrink the state is to enlarge the nation”. With what they’ve tried, the adjustments are a bit more patriotic. It will have been seen.