Or to put it in true, appearances are deceiving. Let's look at an example from last week; motion of no confidence against Pedro Sánchez and, while the candidate Tamames defends in the Congress of Deputies it is not clear if the past or the future, the opposition leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, goes to the Swedish embassy and the joke , the parody, the irony, almost writes itself: Feijóo pretends to be Swedish. That is to say, he becomes clueless or indifferent, he delays and shows that things are not going with him. Everyone understands the expression and more than one must have thought that it could not be a coincidence that Feijóo spent that day, precisely that day, among the Swedes.
And yet, and despite what some may think, it is difficult for the Spanish phrase to have anything to do with the Scandinavian country. Rather, it derives from a Latin word, soccus, which has been prolific and has spread to a good part of Europe. Soccus, in Latin, designated a very simple type of footwear, like a slipper, typical of comedians, a slipper more than a shoe, and certainly much humbler than the coturnos worn by actors representing tragedies. How the Latin soccus came to designate the rustic leather or wooden shoes of the peasants is still a relative mystery for etymologists, but it is clear that the word made a fortune and that it produced sock, which is what the English call the sock, for example, and much more clearly in the Spanish clog, from which other similar words such as zoquete derive, which is both a short thick wooden block and someone who has difficulty understanding things. In Catalan we call soca what in Spanish is a stump, the part of the tree that remains on the ground after felling it. That almost dead trunk, although still connected to its roots, is also a good metaphor for what we experienced a few days ago, but I better not go into that petrified forest and go back to where I was...
That soccus ended up becoming a diphthong and giving Swedish is easy to defend due to its similarity with the evolution of many other Latin terms. The question would be to know when a phrase began to be used, to become Swedish, which perhaps predates the very existence of the kingdom of Sweden. Thus, I am inclined to think that playing Swedish was, in Romance, playing the log, playing the trunk of a dead tree, that is, pretending to be asleep or insensitive. Poor Swedes, who now carry a bad reputation among us as cold and indifferent people that perhaps does not correspond to them (although more amazing is that the Finns top the ranking of the happiest citizens on the planet year after year).
You see, almost nothing -for not being conceited or maximalists- is what it seems. And much less now, when we live surrounded and scrutinized by all sorts of cameras and microphones, but we are incapable of legislating about the new monster that, this time, is going to mean a truly disruptive change in our lives. Artificial intelligence, still not well regulated, is beginning to rear its hydra head and awakens logical fears and hopes of greater benefit for a few. Many professions are threatened by a technological revolution that cannot replace the human labor force that still needs their hands (plumbers, you are the future!) but that, through blockchain, promises to do without notaries and registrars or, thanks to an intelligence artificial that grows day by day, will make translators no longer relevant. Make your list: truck drivers or railway engineers, airline pilots, maybe soldiers, even editors and, why not, journalists. It is already difficult to distinguish what is true news from what is not. And verisimilitude is the easiest virtue to imitate. We are entering a world of uncertainties barefoot and we would need to go, sorry for abusing the metaphor, with very good shoes. So that copyrights continue to exist and so that we continue to be the authors of our rights.
