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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