Arturo Pérez-Reverte sez (via Órdago):
As I type this I still don’t know whether the ultranationalists will succeed in making Catalan the only official and obligatory language in the new statute of autonomy. I should add that I neither know nor care, and that everyone should speak how he facking wants. But the problem is precisely that in Spain people cannot speak as they facking want. Here people have to speak how their village cacique facking wants. And what’s most serious about this is that the state, which is meant to defend our equality and our equality of opportunity, a nation of citizens and not this eternal backbitching [putiferio insolidario], with each dog sucking its own tree of life [donde cada perro se lama su ciruelo, in which each dog licks its own plum tree], criminally action-shy, leaving the staff defenceless and with their necks on the block.
I used to think that cacique came from sheikh (“I’m the sheikh of Araby, this sand belongs to me!”), but Grec says it’s Dominican vernacular for pi$$pot prince, kind of.
I can’t remember what Camilo José Cela’s Diccionario Secreto says about ciruelo, plumtree. Pérez-Reverte’s penile usage is, however, not original. Here for example is a studenty leetle verse by Gurriato:
Puedo decir sin apuro
que has perdido la memoria.
No te preocupa la historia
ni te desvela el futuro.
Es el Alzheimer, seguro,
el tiempo es señor tirano.
Aunque te mantengas sano
la juventud es muy corta,
y ya la vejez te aporta
su ciruelo por el ano.
His almost-sonnet (kan-zo-net-niet) on Manuel de Madre’s Stockholm nationalism is better, but the whole page is a larf, arf, half. (Stockholm is, of course, in Sweden.)
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