Dawn

Dawn

Thursday, January 17, 2013

A Spanish friend told me a couple of days ago that someone in a political forum to which she belonged had threatened to take out a denuncia – or law suit – against someone he felt has insulted him. I found it impossible to believe that the police and the courts would get involved in such trivia but my friend assured me they could. And would. And then I recalled the comment of a fellow-blogger a few months ago – that initiating denuncias was Spain's second favourite sport. By pure coincidence, this comment comes from a British newspaper today:- On social media, it takes only a matter of minutes for an innocuous aside to be inflated to “bullying”. Formerly a very grave charge, in our brave new world of tolerance, bullying now basically means: “They said something I don’t like.” Taking Offence is the new national sport. The writer goes on to stress:- It is not the business of government to banish insults. Nor should it be up to the police to make partial value judgments on what might be considered offensive to a hypothetical person. As the comedian Rowan Atkinson warned, the law had created “an outrage industry” and a society of “an extraordinarily authoritarian and controlling nature”. Quite. And hardly what an unregulated internet was meant to create. The Law of Unintended Consequences yet again.

From Richard Fletcher's Moorish Spain, I learn, inter alia, that:-
  • The Spanish for horseman – jinete – comes from a North African tribal confederation of light cavalry, the Zanata. There's an English word, too, new to me – 'jennet'. Which is 'a small Spanish horse'. 
  • The first translation of the Koran into a Western language was by an Englishman, Robert of Ketton, in 1143. Ketton lies in the heart of Rutland.
  • The English Exchequer is named after a ruled and chequered tablecloth which was used as an abacus from the early 12th century onwards. And:-
  • Roger Bacon was the pupil of a bishop-scholar called Robert Grosseteste. With whom his fellow students probably had some fun when his name was called from the class register.
Maybe I was unfair to Sr Rajoy in suggesting he wouldn't change the mood music in his dealings with the Catalán demands for a referendum on independence. It's reported he is “willing to discuss a new financial compact between Madrid and the autonomous regions, including Cataluña.” However, the sting in the tail was that Madrid “would not tolerate a move towards Catalan secession.” “The unity of Spain” he said “goes back more than five centuries. This is the oldest country in Europe and we are working towards greater integration and not the opposite.” One wonders what form his non-tolerance of a move towards secession would take. Arrests? Military intervention? Cutting off of funds? None of these seems promising to me but perhaps Sr Rajoy, like Baldrick, has a cunning plan. Time will surely tell.

Some stats:-
  • 85% of Spaniards think people lie on their CVs as to the level of their English.
  • 87% of Spaniards say they don't lie on their CV as regards the same thing.
  • 100% of foreigners – and probably Spaniards too – believe that 100% of the latter are lying.
My daughter visited a copistería today, a place where they copy or print out whatever you like. It was empty. I mention this because these used to be exceptionally crowded places. I guess the deep-freezing of the property market has hit them hard.

Finally:- Here's a fulsome review of the book on English manners I mentioned yesterday. Mr Hitchings sounds like a man worth knowing. Perhaps in another age he would have translated the Koran into Latin. Or English, even.

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