Writer and blog friend Jay DiNitto said something funny in the comments of my last post. He asked me if I took drugs — in jest, of course — because my blog is relaxing and exciting at the same time. For a start, I find it funny that anyone thinks my unfocused blog topics are exciting! But, yes, I try to be relaxed.
Let me tell you something about the world. Earlier, when I was taking the dog for our daily constitutional, I witnessed a man with a whip in one of Roswell’s many parks that have been let go to stickers and burs, and he was pulverizing garbage with it … and probably grass, too. Crack! Crack! Crack! That was to the right of me. To the left of me, a car whizzed by, emitting the sounds of angry rap, of which I could only hear angry obscenities before it screeched to turn a corner without reducing speed. Behind me, a speeding truck went through a stop sign, to which the car to his right responding by laying on his horn multiple times.
Maybe I’m overly sensitive, but I feel a sense of anger in the world around me that threatens to overwhelm my senses. I’ve become part of it, as I have to fight to suppress my own anger, and sometimes I’m not good at suppressing it. In short, the world is an angry place, but it’s still chockfull of fascinations. I discover the fascinations to block out the rest. No drugs are needed to throw myself into finding a new tidbit of information.
That has been a long intro and, possibly, an apology for the tidbit of information I had planned to share on my blog today. It’s not very exciting! But it’s actually very interesting to me. Due to my seeking out Spanish news articles and listening to Mexican music on my phone’s YouTube app, Google now recommends Spanish news articles to me. I would say about 50% of its recommendations to me are in Spanish. And they’re oddball news articles, too. When I seek out news to read in Spanish, I look for current events from Mexican media sources (yes, I’m slightly obsessed with Mexico, so I’m naturally going to seek those out). Google rather recommends articles about archaeology, history, and obscure language issues.
The tidbit of information I’m going to share — are you breathless in anticipation yet? On tenterhooks? — is from that last category. While that article has disappeared from my Google news stream, I found a comparable article about the subject here. What piqued my interest was the title (similar to this one): Existe una palabra en español que no se puede escribir. Wait, what? How could there be a word that you can speak but not write? As far as I know, English has no such thing because it has all the phonetic sounds from the alphabet and the normal blending of letters, and then it has exceptions to them. I know this because I’ve been teaching English phonetics for years. I have a few handy, torn-up manuals that teach all sounds in the English language. In the 19th C, if Webster had come across a peculiar word that didn’t fit the normal phonetic rules, he would have found a “best spelling” for it and put it in his dictionary. That, however, wasn’t peculiar to Webster. English had been doing that for a very long time. Webster simply wanted to streamline and regulate the spellings for a new English-speaking nation.
Apparently, there’s no such wiggle room in Spanish for such bold dealings. In this case, the word in question is the command form of salirle, which basically means get out! In order to write this, you would end up with salle, the “ll” making a “y” sound instead of an “l”. This article is actually not as comparable as I though it was; it’s much shorter. The one I read goes on for a space, talking about how this topic was discussed by the Real Academia Español, who determined that an exception couldn’t be made for this command form, or even that it could be written differently, e.g., sal le. Its recommendation was for writers to reconstruct their sentences to avoid this form. My thoughts ran to court transcriptions and the like. What then, Royal Academy? What happens then??!! What if a witness is telling the court the last conversation she had with her murderous employer, in which he is breaching her quarters and she shouts, “¡Sal-le!”? What then, I ask you? How is the court scribe supposed to type that out? I wish I could find the original article, though I don’t think it went into quite that much depth.
It did just occur to me that, in addition to forming a creative story in which a person might be forced to write an unwritable word, I could come up with a reasonable explanation for why a man was whipping garbage and grass in the park with an actual bonafide whip. Did you know a circus got stranded in Roswell during the original pandemic shutdown? For months, their tents and trucks were parked at the fairgrounds looking forlorn, not like a circus at all, but like wasted dreams. What if that man in the park wasn’t angry at all. What if he was the lion tamer, and he lost his job and became permanently trapped here? What if he was just practicing so he could find another job?
Or maybe he was a really awful lion tamer, and his bosses, clearly Spanish speakers, finally told him to “—–!” Sorry, but I don’t want the Academy after me. But the funniest part of this to me is I’ve never heard anyone use the term salirle as a command. Maybe it happens all the time in actual Spanish-speaking countries. Here, though, the circus manager would probably just shout the very transcribable ¡Váyase, señor!
And with that, I think it’s time to leave now.
Jill Domschot 