“Está plomizo” – leaden skies over Argentina’s congreso building.
"Under Leaden Skies"
by Joel Bowman
"Qué noche llena de hastío y de frío!
El viento trae un extraño lamento..."
(“What a night, full of weariness and cold!
The wind carries a strange lament...”)
~ Garúa, by Aníbal Troilo y Enrique Cadícamo (1943)
Buenos Aires, Argentina - "It’s a rainy ol’ day down here in the Paris of the South; “está plomizo,” as the locals say (lit. “it is leaden”), a perfect description for the heavy skies overhead. Strolling the deserted streets on our morning walk, the puddles reflecting the slate gray heavens above, we began reckoning on the way thoughts and speech interact and even influence one another. (Readers not in thrall to the abstract are kindly invited to skip ahead a couple hundred words...)
There’s a long history to this field of study, giving rise to theories from linguistic determinism to linguistic relativity and, on the other end of the spectrum, language of thought (LOTH). Our own mere musings are not nearly so clear or polished, but we offer a few crude examples nevertheless, if only as food for thought...
Take the Spanish verb for “to earn,” (ganar). It is the same as the verb for “to gain,” but also for “to win.” What does it mean when “earning” a wage is the same as “winning” one? Might this speak to a kind of zero-sum default setting in the ear of the Spanish language speaker? In other words, if one person “earns/wins” something, doesn’t it then stand to reason that another has “lost” that something?
And if trade is thereby reduced to “winning” and “losing,” how might one explain the concept of mutually beneficial exchange... where both voluntary parties to a trade gain from the exercise, a classic “win-win” situation? The idea exists, surely, but is it linguistically non-intuitive?
Then, to take it a step further, does this make Spanish speakers more susceptible to, say, the seductive whisperings of Marxist economic philosophy, where the world is viewed through winners and losers in a never-ending class struggle – oppressor vs. oppressed, master vs. slave, bourgeoisie vs. proletariat?
Then there’s the verb for “to wait” (esperar), which is the same as “to hope.” Does this mean Spanish speakers are inherently more inclined to optimism... or cynicism? Is waiting for the bus really a wishful event? On the other hand, what does it mean to hope your spouse returns from the shop? In English, the verb “to wait” is generally considered neutral... unlike, say “to dread” or “to long,” which have their own particular connotations. And then there’s the noun for wife (esposa)... which is also the Spanish word for handcuffs (las espossas). Hmm... best leave that one for another Note.
But enough of our rainy day ruminations. (Too much caffeine, clearly... or not enough malbec.) Let us return, rather, to our task at hand... Free Markets, Free Minds and Free People... In this week’s note we offered some thoughts from the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer on stupidity as one of evil’s greatest tools."
"Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Idiots"
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