Lengua

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.” –George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’.

He’s back. Spain’s former prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, has returned as a sports pundit, writing op-ed columns for the El Debate news outlet about the European football championship. This is not the first time – the former leader of the Partido Popular, who governed for seven years, also wrote a series of articles during the 2022 World Cup. His début during this tournament began as follows [my translation]:

Hello everyone. The Spanish football team is going to give us plenty to cheer about in this European championship. We need it. It will not be enough to mitigate the unpleasantness that you-know-who gives us every day. But at least it’s something….

It continues with the following observation of Spain’s opening win against Croatia:

It is good to start like this, because everybody knows that the early bird catches the worm. Or if you don’t believe that: first come first served.

And it ends with the conclusion:

Let’s see, I am optimistic. Those who are not are foolish…and are pessimists.

It’s tempting to wonder if El Debate has created a spoof column lampooning Rajoy with a prose style whose vacuity and artlessness are reminiscent of his political heyday. The equivocation, the inconsequential musing, the almost heroic refusal to say anything interesting all seem to represent the Galician so faithfully that this text could have been written by someone trying out for a Rajoy tribute act. Yet, unfortunately, neither Rajoy nor El Debate seem to be in on the joke.

Remember, those words were written by a man who represented Spain at international summits and who managed its economy. And what they do successfully – and inadvertently – is highlight not just the terrible writing of one former politician but a broader problem in Spain, affecting everyone from schoolchildren to government ministers and esteemed intellectuals, which is the devaluation of language.

My own attention has been drawn to this in recent years as I have watched in dismay how my children have been taught Lengua – Spanish language and literature – from primary school onwards. The onus is on the minutiae of grammar and syntax, which is learned in rote form as if it were Maths times tables. Adverbs and adjectives are broken down and examined in obsessive detail before being memorised for endless tests and exams. Literature – novels, short stories, poetry and drama – is shoved to the sidelines and seldom touched as the curriculum hammers home its gerunds, adverbial subgenres and subjunctive clauses.

As a result, generation after generation of schoolchildren have had any spark of enthusiasm for Spanish literature ironed out of them until reading becomes little more than a fringe activity. Cervantes, Lorca and Delibes are mere museum pieces. Meanwhile, the skill of expressing oneself with words, putting thoughts into concise and clear prose, is being crushed by the education system.

One of the inevitable results of this is a loss of understanding of what good literature is, a skewing of tastes. Through this prism, for example, it is easy to make a link between language’s plummeting stock and the state of Spain’s book industry.

In 2023, the TV presenter Sonsoles Ónega won the Planeta prize for her novel Las hijas de la criada. Worth 1 million euros, El Planeta is apparently the most lucrative literary award in the world (giving away slightly more money than the Nobel), which in the past has been given to the work of the likes of Jorge Semprún, Camilo José Cela and Mario Vargas Llosa. And yet, many critics could not take Ónega’s novel seriously as a piece of literature due to its odd moral tone and lowbrow quality. In his review of Las hijas de la criada in El País’s Babelia supplement, Jordi Gracia could barely contain his fury at what the 2023 Planeta said about Spain’s literary world.

The popular presenter Sonsoles Ónega bears not the slightest responsibility for this calamity: she has written the best novel she can, in the same way she has written and published many others. The systemic problem is the abandonment of duty of the seven members of the jury and the publishing house [Planeta], making this such a massive fraud which once again betrays the trust of a majority of Spaniards who want to read entertaining stories without having to navigate through moral and literary misery.

Of course, making books close to unaffordable in shops does not help (Ónega’s novel can be yours for 21.75 euros), but a major culprit here has to be an ingrained disdain for the written word.

Unsurprisingly, Spain’s politicians have been as susceptible to this problem as anyone. When transport minister Óscar Puente described Pedro Sánchez as el puto amo (“the fucking boss”) before Socialist supporters recently, he was not just being profane, he was showing a lack of imagination with words.   

So too was Madrid’s conservative regional president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, when she mouthed the words hijo de puta at Sánchez during a parliamentary debate. Poor language corrupts thought and in Spanish politics insults have become the dominant currency, squeezing out the vision, proposals and policies that might be expected from lawmakers.

Unfortunately, the abuse and misuse of language has also become a problem for members of the intelligentsia. Of course, the proliferation of self-edited websites and blogs (like this one, in fact), along with the equally unfiltered op-ed sewage that fills Twitter has perhaps made this inevitable. Fernando Savater, one of the country’s most prominent intellectuals, has been a victim of this. If any issue demanded a sober and insightful debate it was the government’s controversial amnesty law, with its constitutional, political and moral conundrums. Yet Savater, like so many other commentators, has not been up to the task. Instead, he has embarked on vitriolic rants in which he tars anyone who speaks out in favour of the law as an intellectual pygmy.

One example was the following sarcastic diatribe against the political scientist Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca over the issue of whether Catalan separatist activity could be deemed terrorism:

Judge García Castellón, the Supreme Court prosecutors who mostly think as he does, the opinion columnists who agree, albeit cautiously, they are all rabble who know nothing about terrorism because they haven’t studied the subject as Sánchez-Cuenca has who, because of his intelligence, should be called Sánchez Oxford or at least Sánchez Salamanca. My legs tremble before the great man on his podium and my voice falters, but I shall not be quiet, forgive my impudence…

In the same article, Savater cites George Orwell and his essay Politics and the English Language. But the author of Animal Farm would have been horrified at Savater’s self-aggrandisement, rambling sentences and child-like need to attack his adversary rather than their arguments.

Deficient use of language comes in many forms. Rajoy, for example, has a very different weakness to that of Savater. He plays neither the man nor the ball, instead writing in a hapless vacuum, where aphorisms collide with banalities to produce a text which leaves you feeling you have been robbed of time and wisdom simply by reading it.

“Lots of laughs with Rajoy, but it should worry us that a former prime minister’s writing is of the standard of a sixth-year primary school pupil,” noted the journalist and writer David Jiménez.

For the next month or so, we will indeed laugh at the awfulness of Rajoy’s prose. But afterwards we will have to consider a more sobering thought: that it is just part of a much bigger problem.