SPANISH WORDS FROM YESTERDAY, TODAY

 Language is at the beck and call of speakers and their social mindset: obey orders if you break owners. Words and expressions are current as long as they serve a purpose, otherwise, they are discarded, forgotten, and ostracized. Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the President of the Community of Madrid, in Spain, has alerted me several times about Spanish vocabulary and expressions of the Castillian language. I recall offhand “tinta de calamar”, an expression I ignored before she used it in a public speech. Recently, she accused the nation’s socialist administration of trying to lead Spaniards “del ronzal” to its political convenience and advantage. I more than double her age and the word “ronzal” brought memories, as a boy, of my summers in my grandfather’s country house when I pulled “burros del ronzal”, when donkeys, mules, and horses abounded - they almost extinct now. That era is long gone; an era of “serones”, “ramales”, “albardas”, “azadas”… and yet, a woman in her early forties, ad-libbing while speaking in public and expressing the idea that people are being led by the nose, willy-nilly, uses the expression “llevar del ronzal”. It is not a trivial question, and it stresses the mysteries of words and their die-hard resilience.