LAS LENGUAS INGLESA Y ESPAÑOLA de Delfín Carbonell

Does Spanish Have a Future in the United States? Spanish intellectuals often congratulate one another on the supposedly bright future of Spanish in the United States: forty-five million Latinos, no less, and even an Academy of the Spanish Language to seal the deal. In cities like New York, they say, English is no longer indispensable. Fancy that. I keep mum. Experience has taught me that there is no disputing about language, just as there is no disputing about taste. Pirandello said it best in Così è (se vi pare!) : everyone is right. And yet one cannot help asking: whatever happened to Italian in the United States? Once the second most widely spoken language, it survived for barely a generation. The same fate befell Yiddish and German. The pattern is familiar: immigrant languages may flourish briefly, but without sustained transmission, they gradually yield to English. Spanish will be no exception. It will remain visible, useful, even influential in certain contexts, but not as a comp...

  The expression tener ideas de bombero is defined in Seco’s dictionary, under bombero , as ideas “propias de persona torpe y sin ingenio.” María Moliner, under idea , gives “idea descabellada.” The DRAE likewise explains the idiom as “descabellado o absurdo.” Writers have used the phrase with this same sense. Eduardo Mendoza includes it in La verdad del caso Savolta (1973): “Nicolás tiene ideas de bombero.” Torcuato Luca de Tena writes “Tienes ideas de bombero” in Los renglones torcidos de Dios (1979). The meaning is reasonably clear on its own; it sharpens even further when we look for an idiomatic English equivalent. Options include harebrained , half-baked , madcap , screwball , or crackpot idea or opinion. One might also choose horseback idea/opinion , which Paul Green et al. define in Paul Green’s Wordbook (1998, US) as “a hurried judgement or opinion, guesswork.” Those of us who work between two languages can often refine translations or equivalents by searching ...

  Desde siempre he sabido del escritor Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), premio Nobel de Literatura, y he leído sus novelas Arrowsmith , Main Street y Babbitt . Pero estos días, buceando en su obra para la tercera parte de mi Literatura en lengua inglesa (Editatum), he descubierto su novela distópica de 1935 It Can't Happen Here . Visto lo visto en los recientes acontecimientos políticos en los Estados Unidos, quizá haya que replantearse aquello de que “eso no puede pasar aquí”. La novela trata de un demagogo y populista norteamericano que, elegido presidente, promete una vuelta a valores tradicionales, reformas económicas drásticas y un clima de miedo. Una vez en el poder, se convierte en dictador… y no cuento más. It Can't Happen Here , ficción al fin y al cabo, da que pensar —especialmente por su título— y nos lleva a preguntarnos si esa afirmación, tan confiada, podría cobrar sentido en otros países, como España. Voy a leer la novela.

Why are so many educators today averse to memorization? When did committing facts, lines of poetry, or elegant ideas to memory become unfashionable? I come from a generation that learned verses, literary passages, equations, historical dates, and geography by heart —and here I stand, none the worse for wear. In fact, I maintain that we are our memory; we are what we carry in the mind. It is no accident that Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, was mother to the nine Muses. I still honor her by memorizing as much as I can, even at my age. I explore these thoughts further in my article for VivaFifty :   https://www.vivafifty.com/aprende-memoria-mente-7450/  

  Do we think with language—or with concepts? When I was a teenager in the States, people often asked me what language I used when thinking alone. At the time, I took it for granted that thinking meant an inner verbal dialogue—English or Spanish, depending on the day. Only later did I realize the question itself was flawed. Curious, I recently looked online and found the usual well-meaning but muddled explanations—proof of how easily people confuse thinking with the words we use to describe it. In Spain, interestingly, no one has ever asked me this. Instead, I have asked others: “When you think, Mr. García López, do you use words or concepts?” Most cannot answer. And that is revealing. Consider two simple examples. Driving down the road: A ball rolls out. Linguistic thinking: “A ball. A child must be nearby… I should brake carefully because of the tailgater behind me.” Half a minute. Conceptual thinking: you see the ball, picture the child, sense the tailgater, and brak...

I have said this before, but it bears repeating: you would not believe how many speakers of both English and Spanish flatly deny, to my face, that an expression or idiom I have used even exists. At such moments, I paraphrase Ortega y Gasset: the horizon of our language is not the horizon of language. Native speakers invariably assume that if an expression is unfamiliar to them, then it cannot possibly belong to the language. Full stop. This is precisely why I insist on citations—real citations, in print—that demonstrate an idiom’s validated existence. A good example is the vintage Spanish saying “no es nada lo del ojo, y lo llevaba en la mano.” It means Nothing to worry about; it’s small potatoes, no big deal. Amando de Miguel recounts its origin: “El toro se llamaba, premonitoriamente, Barrabás, el cual espetó una cornada en el ojo del pobre matador. Acudieron los peones al quite y el maestro, para darles ánimos, les decía: No es nada, no es nada lo del ojo. Para demostrarlo, recog...