LAS LENGUAS INGLESA Y ESPAÑOLA de Delfín Carbonell

  While reading the article “The people at the center of the war” by Parin Behrooz in The New York Times (April 10), I came across a sentence that contains two very small slips—of the sort that occasionally appear in even the best-edited publications. The sentence reads: “That war began with explicit encouragement for Iranians to rise up and ended with U.S. threats to bomb the country back to the ‘Stone Ages’ has not been lost on the people living through it.” Two details may be noted in passing. First, the familiar English expression is “the Stone Age,” not “the Stone Ages.” Second, the grammatical subject of the sentence is the compound statement introduced by that (“that war began … and ended …”), which would normally take a plural verb: have not been lost rather than has not been lost. These are, of course, minor points that do not affect the sense of the passage. They simply remind us how demanding careful copy-editing can be. Readers of a certain generation may recall a...

  Nature has laws we cannot escape. Life is a struggle for survival among living beings driven to thrive and reproduce. In that struggle, we fall prey to countless enemies, many microscopic. What we call disease consists of tiny organisms that do not intend to harm us, yet must use our bodies to thrive. If we overcome them, they lose; if they prevail, we die. That is neither good nor bad—simply a fact. I have fought my share of such battles and, so far, prevailed: ear infections, measles, chickenpox, kidney stones, two severe bouts of flu, endless colds, gastritis, headaches, a heart attack, cancer. The usual fare, if one lives long enough. Add to this the wear and tear of time on body and mind. I am 87 and still pushing on. Time allows no pause. Despite everything, I have lived a largely healthy, active, and mostly pain-free life. I was born before penicillin came into common use, which says something about the stamina of my body. I am, by any measure, a survivor—fortunate, and ...

  Of late, I have been noticing a tendency to employ "firstly", "secondly" instead of "first, second", as in "Firstly I wish to thank..." instead of "First I wish to thank..." It is not wrong, of course, and the adverb has been in use this way for centuries; even Fowler ,  however, tended to prefer first, second , etc., rather than firstly, secondly , and expressions such as “last but not least” would sound odd if turned into “lastly but not least.  I simply wanted to point this out in case someone like me was wondering. 

  I have always said it as "codo con codo", shoulder to shoulder, meaning side by side, but I read in a journal "codo a codo" and I rushed to my dictionaries to double-check. Was it a mistake? Nope, it wasn't. María Moliner uses the preposition "con", and Seco registers the idiom with "a".  Finally, the Diccionario de la Real Academia accepts both prepositions. Live and learn! So you can say: "Petra y yo trabajamos codo con codo", and "Petra y yo trabajamos codo a codo." 

Toda la obra Crítica efímera , es un dechado de buen escribir, acertada crítica, buen humor y correcciones lingüísticas. A propósito del lenguaje, me arriesgo a entresacar la siguiente cita, escrita en 1919, por si puede servir de algo a alguien o como recordatorio de épocas lejanas.   "... por defectuosa organización de la enseñanza oficial, y hasta por carencia de obras racionales que faciliten el conocimiento práctico del idioma, nuestros literatos, salvo honrosas excepciones, se arrojan a llenar cuartillas sin haber aprendido a manejar el instrumento de su arte, y, naturalmente, desafinan. De aquí que entre nosotros sea más necesaria, y también más eficaz, la policía del lenguaje." Julio Casares, Crítica efímera , "Una fábula de aduaneros y matuteros", Espasa-Calpe, 1962. (Publicado originalmente en 1919.)

 People no longer seem to care as much about how they dress, but there was a time when being elegant, dapper, smart, well-groomed, and stylish was the ideal everyone aspired to. Men and women dressed to kill, to the nines, and took pride in being well-dressed at all times. The Spanish language, too, bears witness to this former obsession with dress, with expressions such as ir hecho un pincel ( hecho un brazo de mar ) ir de tiros largos or maqueado.  If this increasingly casual approach to dress persists, such expressions may survive only in dictionaries. Juan vino a la fiesta hecho un pincel John came to the party dressed to the nines — “… se ponía hecho un pincel aunque solo fuera a ir al mercado.” Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sefarad , 2001. Esp. || “… lo mandé planchar, hice almidonar la camisa y…hecho un brazo de mar, bajé al comedor.” Manuel Leguineche, El camino más corto , 1995. Esp.