Dear wise men,
I don’t know if this last year I have been good or not, but I know that I have been very annoying with one topic: my tongue. One day, while we were having a drink in Plaza Virreina, a person I appreciate told me that he likes columnists who write about what they are passionate about, but that he personally hates reading columns that transform that passion until it dilutes it into a I continue to regret, like a kind of broken record. I’m not talking about you, hey, he told me while lighting a cigarette and I told him that he doesn’t know how to lie. Evidently, I felt so addressed that I unconsciously responded that my great passion is to write about literature, about bars with their own soul or about conversations in a taxi, but that even talking about these topics I can’t avoid making a fuss about Catalan, since that For Catalans, language is not a theme, but a filter through which the world is observed.
Therefore, for example, when Narcís Oller wrote the butterflythe year 1886 and with a prologue by the great Emile Zolathe first reaction he received from Benito Pérez-Galdós It was not a narrative assessment, but a letter in which the novelist reproached him for saying that “it is very stupid that you write in Catalan”, and also for that reason when the bar Two Schmucks entered last year Top10 of the best cocktail bars in the world, what many of us did was not run to the Raval to have a Garam Sour, but, logically, criticize that the establishment, despite being in Barcelona, only spoke in English. Whether because we speak it too much or because it is spoken too little, any central aspect of life, daily, has to do with this language of ours, minoritized by a universal language like Spanish and threatened by a global phenomenon like globalization. The Catalan’s cause is a noble cause and he has plenty of arguments to fight for it.there would be more to go, but there is a problem: for years, we have lived with the permanent feeling that we are losing the battlebut instead of fighting to join forces and change the result with enthusiasm, realism and seduction, we rather dedicate ourselves to lick our wounds that permanently remind us, at all hours, how annoyed we are.
But don’t worry, I haven’t decided to write this year’s letter to ask you for better figures on the social use of Catalan. You are ‘wizards’, but not that much. What I ask of you is that you give Catalans vaccinated against discouragement, since the only thing that will allow the situation to improve is to regain hope. If you don’t know where to get them, I inform you that they are hidden in several warehouses. North Cataloniajust like the ballot boxes October 1st. Surely your camels have a good GPS and know how to find them. Needles have always scared me, but last spring I co-directed a “30 minutes” on Catalan in Catalonia Nord and the prick in the arm that knowing that linguistic reality gave me has made me immunized so much so that since then I have been someone else. I have not stopped writing about language, but I have done so with a different tone. Including, logically, the very tone of that report. It always generates more retweets and sells more newspapers, explaining that you have gone to spoonful and they haven’t understood you at the pharmacy when you asked for sunscreen, but perhaps what we need is to say louder than 82% of the inhabitants of Catalunya Nord say they want to learn Catalan and let your children learn it. Some will say that it is denying reality, but perhaps if we dedicated more headlines to the second news item than to the first anecdote, a Catalan one like Rosalia he would have dared to speak in Catalan when this summer he sang in the Barcares.
Being critical is necessary, but becoming obsessed ends up being destructive. Just last week, without going any further, on Twitter there was much more talk about the use of Catalan among young people falling 15 points in the last 15 years than, for example, about the presentation of ViaRápida, a much-needed YouTube channel with informative whiteboard videos, in Catalan, on the History topics studied in ESO. It also always draws more attention that in Barcelona, only 1 in 3 companies claim to regularly serve in Catalan or that only 1 in 4 ESO students identify with Catalan, but I do ask you to give all Catalans the vaccine What I’m telling you is because the glass can always be seen. half emptyOf course, but when you realize that the avalanche of requests for CPNL Catalan courses saturates the system, that 84% of Catalans want Catalan to be official in the European Union or that The Tyets have raised 13 million of listening to ‘Coti x Coti’, to give three examples, I think there are plenty of arguments to see it too half full. It would have also been easier for me to write a column today explaining that last December 30, while shopping for New Year’s Eve dinner with my friends, I asked a saleswoman at the Carrefour in Sant Miquel de Olèrdola (Alt Penedès) where the trout pre-cooked and his response was ‘the ones that‘?.
If I make a tweet saying it, I’ll post it with likes and, on the rebound, we’ll criticize Carrefour, which We Catalans are passionate about giving birth to everything that is French. But not. It turns out that I told him troutagain, but since she answered me again the same as the first time, with a bad-tempered tone, obviously I had to tell her ‘the tortillas’. Unexpectedly, she asked me for forgiveness, she turned red and while she accompanied me to the refrigerator aisle she explained to me that she was Argentine, it had been a month and a half since she had arrived in Vilafranca del Penedès and she still didn’t know what the trout. But now I know, and my new year’s resolution is to learn catalan, told me. Mine, I told him, is to learn to make homemade tortillas and not have to buy them at the supermarket, I responded bilingually, as you would like in Salvador Illa, with a tone radically different from the one he had used a minute before. The girl laughed and stopped turning red, but when she asked me what my real New Year’s resolution was, suddenly I was the one who was speechless. Be more positive and stop messing around with CatalanI told him before saying goodbye and good year.
Thus, this public letter that I send you, dear Three Wise Men, is also the last article on the Catalan language that I will publish in “Coffee, drink and whistle,“since talking about Catalan again and again in a complaining tone, without any informative basis and with apocalyptic desolation as a flag, will not make more people speak Catalan. In any case, it will make fewer people feel attracted to a topic that, after repeating it so much, it ends up giving the same laziness as the debate on the inheritance taxthe controversy over the origins of the first babies of the year born in Catalonia or the few traces of guardiolismo that Barça contains Xavi. Just as the tribe’s controversies seem immortal and cyclical, neither Catalans and the language we speak will never die, since as a culture we have such deep ancient roots that one day, sooner rather than later, most of us will realize that the global Catalonia of the future will speak in Catalan or it will not be. We will understand, then, that vaccinating against discouragement has nothing to do with language. Not even with independence, in fact, but with a better future where, as a society, we do not spend our days whining about what we lose, but rather giving value to what we have and working to build what we never want to lose: prosperity. Not even that, right now, you need to hide it among gold, frankincense and myrrh.
Carefully,
An ex-pessimist named Pep
2024-01-04 04:30:00
#vaccine #discouragement
