"Forget", "able", "things have happened", "friends", "we would not leave", and other fears of the Argentine language

-Forget it … – Repeat insistently to reaffirm that something is true or will happen yes or yes.

The way of talking about a society, the choice of words, is usually an unholy mirror of time. It does not fail. Today, when the post-truth relativizes or destroys all certainty and suspicion is worth as much, if not more, than real information, it has become habitual to badert something by appealing to forgetfulness. Forgotten as affirmation. Nothing we have not heard until the satiety of recent times.

The construction "it's good " instead of "it's good", is another symptom of the gas of ideas and convictions of the moment in which we live.

Something "is good" today, and may stop being tomorrow. To say that something is "good" requires minimal intellectual commitment. Which does not abound in anything, it's true. The being went from the idea of ​​the Nazi but at the same time a great philosopher Martin Heidegger ("When the time is only speed, instantaneity and simultaneity, while the temporal, understood as historical event, has disappeared from the existence of all peoples …") in a simple yoghurt.

And virtue, ability, talent, have brought it down into the abyss of cruel doubt. You see, but:

"Able that yes." "Capable your idea is that" "Able calls us tomorrow," they repeat all the time, even in the radio and television media, instead of maybe or maybe.

Spaniards celebrate and repeat "Come!". We, in the same situation and to encourage us, we choose with brutal honesty the "Come!", or the advocacy force "Vamo's eh …! Vamoooo's …!" So we Argentines are going. In exile, stumble on the same stone, right to the chasm, to the front. We go and accept in a resort, usually abroad, thanks to the economic shock that we spend every ten or twelve years. Never underestimate the power of denial.

The Spanish they promise accomplished facts ("The party was great, I promise!") And, perhaps as an unwanted inheritance of Franco's many years, they still appeal to the "Norma" to explain the usual: "It's normal", to define.

"It makes sense"we say, even if logic is not too important a factor to unify our thought as a nation. If the truth is imposed by the power, said Foucault, it is the same for the pendulum logic of the native.

In Spain, many women start a discussion and if they coincide soon, some will say: "Man, of course!" This occurs in a social group that always feels normal to call "Cojonudo" (cojones, masculine attributes) to all that is fun and "cognac" (feminine) to all boring or intolerable. Two details that could cause overwork to any convinced feminist.

It seems strange to us, but no less strange is an Argentinian peculiarity that the Spaniards and many other foreigners perceive clearly … and we do not. A tic that should stay long on the couch of a good psychobadyst. The Argentines affirm or begin a sentence or an idea of ​​the negation.

– How do you overcome after the last crisis of the company?

• No, there are still good growth opportunities, we have to …
• No, the variables are far from ideal, but we have confidence in …
• No, it's for us the opportunity to come back in …

No. A word that, oddly enough, disappears when it comes to explaining things that did not go according to plan. To be fair, there is no yes or a strong statement. Ambiguity, euphemism, reigns in these cases among us, that it is about politicians, economists, businessmen or from football players who answer. Liquid consistency

-What is the plan to improve the bad results of this semester?

• I do not know if they were bad, we must take into account that …
• I do not know if it's bad, because under the current circumstances …
• I do not know if it was so bad, for me it was positive that …

The language is much more than a system of signs. It is said: it is a mirror that reflects the spirit of an era.

In the turbulent, dreamy and excessive 70 years, parties, what boys call today "Joined"They were "Assault." Just like that, without anesthesia, with soft drinks, plastic cups and Creedence discs. In time of guerrilla war and illegal repression, if anything was good, more than good, exciting or not to be missed "Copado", "Re copado" or "Copadísimo". Another way to express maximum approval was "He killed!", Or "He killed a thousand!".

On the contrary, things got complicated and the problems started, then "All rotten". Be "Re rotten" must be fed up, tired. There is no need to go too far to notice the direct relationship that existed between death and the teenage imagination of the seventies. A phenomenon that, curiously or not so much, is still maintained.

As a sad legacy of the military language of dictatorship, already in the early days of democracy, a curious way of calling offices where political parties received information at each election was imposed. They always call each other like that. "Bunkers ". The "Own troop" they are the most loyal activists, or legislators.

The alluvium of the new slang broke out in the 1990s, the marginal factory created from the economic management of Domingo Cavallo. Words have emerged that are now part of Aboriginal culture.

The most original, or surprising, is the use of "Endurance"quality to tolerate, support, have courage in adversity, as synonymous with courage. Courage! A very modest aspiration, appropriate to the historical situation. Endurance, converted into popular culture, also refers to waiting ("Can you hold me five minutes?"), To a loan of money ("Hold me at 100 pesos and I'll give it back to you when you paieras ") and, in general, to support with what pity: (" You calm, that I make you endurance ").

Another clbadic phrase from the 90s is a new and cruel insult among the poor, later popularized in the middle clbades: "You do not exist."

Before, even in the marginality of football, bad was the perfect resource to denigrate the other.

Sex as submitted, of course. Whatever it is, for this to happen, it took two: humiliated and humiliated. This is not the case in this new way of permanently marginalizing, to deny the elemental: l & # 39; existence.

The "Your no existís" increased when social mobility was canceled and marginalization increased in the emergency villages where its inhabitants would no longer leave. This is not a metaphor, it is a description without the slightest pity.

Before that, the most widespread insult among the poor was "Villero". It's like that that they called him René Houseman, despised for his non-negotiable love for his native neighborhood, Villa del Bajo Belgrano. To be villero, at that time, was to be lazy, resigned to live in sheet metal houses and a dirt floor, a left. The poor man who, with his effort, managed to build his hardware house, despised him for being a bad example for his children.

Already in the Menem decade, with no possibility of leaving and with new inhabitants who made the villas grow towards a precarious horizontal property, the first "clbad" cultural phenomenon was born in almost a century, from the birth of the bordello tango: the cumbia villera. An aesthetic and musical shame, perhaps, but very clear when it comes to claiming a condition that was hitherto taboo, even among the most humble.

Marcelo Tinelli directed the group Ladies Free to your program but Pablo Lezcanohis boss did not accommodate the explicit, hard patibularias to a mbadive program in central time, and did nothing to ask his audience to show restraint. He did not compromise, they would say in his jargon. It was the beginning and the goodbyes. The program preferred to bademble an imitation villera group, with funny but tolerable lyrics, with Miguel del Sel and Carlos Bilardo in the foreground. Something else.

So far, we have reported, without qualifying – apart from an aesthetic and musical error, perhaps detrimental to the cumbia villera – that language has changed over the last 40 years, with a slang that completely displaced the one our grandparents knew.

It is now the turn of a less spontaneous phenomenon, and perhaps for this reason, less sympathetic to who this is written: inclusive language.

No one must doubt that the inclusive language has a very good intention: to do justice to the feminine gender after the historical ninguneo that the woman has suffered, denied as a historical subject and taken for a simple purpose. Nobody in their minds could oppose this kind of claim and the furious attacks of primitive men like the President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonarothey only reaffirm the cause and honor it.

Half a million women demonstrate in the streets of Buenos Aires they voted for the Act of legal interruption of pregnancy that, a few days ago, he was down. This struggle, this mobilization has forced its treatment in the Senate and will surely be adopted soon, this year or next year. It will happen. From this column, they are applauded, admired and supported in their struggle for Not one less and the relentless denunciation of uncontrolled bad, scurvy, stalkers and vermin for style. It's impossible not to be with them.

Having said that, I must say – in a very personal way – that Inclusive language seems confusing, impractical and aesthetically scary.

Alfred Hitchbad advised not to kill a child or a pet in the middle of a movie. "These are distracting elements that conspire on the narrative rhythm, they divert the viewer from his concentration and can ruin the best scene." With the clear differences between the cases, I remembered this Hitchbadian sentence when a friend who was coming back to do the historic tour of the old ESMA had confessed his burden every time the guide needed to clarify "Prisoners and prisoners", "kidnapped and abducted", "transferred and transferred".

The Argentine tragedy that synthesizes this infamous site of torture and death is so powerful that emotion or anguish can tolerate any repetition, as useless as it may seem. This is not serious. But it really distracts. There were men and women in this hell that Emilio Mbadera had gathered to prepare his political party; We, the adults, know it and the youngest can learn all the necessary information, right there.

What is written is more complicated to digest. When someone writes "I went with my friends and my compañerxes". How should it be read? How Serbian names, or something like that? Does it facilitate or confuse this laudable way of defending the feminine?

Those who do not use x prefer the letter "e" to flat out the differences between the bades. In this case, the sentence becomes: "We went with my friends and companions." With all due respect, this seems like a bad joke. Something similar to what Borges, with his sour humor, commented on some Catalans "… who, unfortunately, did not give them to be French."

The movement for equality and the claim of the feminine gender in the face of patriarchal oppression is the most important political novelty of recent years. It is precisely for this reason that this minor gesture of modification of language does not honor the enormous importance of the phenomenon..

Having already raised the controversy for an inclusive language (which can trigger a reaction that will be very welcome), we have chosen to conclude two new phenomena that, as always, speak of us more than ourselves.

One is the use of conditional or potential time, old journalistic resource to say without saying, and to avoid judgments, today much used by the youngest: "This girl would not give you a ball", relativized with a smile against the most cruel proofs. "It would not be okay"they resign themselves to screwing up everything.

It does not cease to be an unintentional anti-homage to the post-truth empire, where everything is possible, whether it is true, rumor or invention, with a good potential verb as a shield.

And the other, a bizarre Kantian pretension to the thing in itself, transferred to almost everything.

"Things have happened"says the president Mauricio Macriwith a fatal air, somewhat resigned. "Things did not go well"say footballers who lose games or finals. "Things do not come well at all", protests at businessmen and Greek choir employees confronted with lack of consumption "I'm coming to fight for important things", newcomers promise to a club or a company.

Nobody clarifies anymore. Things, like sacred codes, are secret and unpronounceable. They adapt to the imagination of each consumer. And something else.

Because things have to be well done, clearly, before other things happen to us.

We would only learn now, compatriots.