The philosopher Javier Gomá maintains that human dignity has expanded so much in the last two hundred years, by way of facts and rights, that any inconvenience or slight inconvenience we tend to turn into an affront, if not an aggression. The Royal Spanish Academy – which, like any club for the elderly, when it has nothing to do, which is almost all the time, kills flies with its tail – has decided to hesitate a little more to the staff and, thirteen years after having typified in the criminal code of spelling, has decriminalized the use of the accent in the adverb only when there is a risk of ambiguity.
In the written networks –that is, on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram captions–, those that emphasize, the transfer has caused revelry, chinchines de solysombras [in italics, because it is not in the dictionary: it is a drink for people in testamentary age, the result of mixing cognac and anise] and slapped on the zinc bar of the intrepid captains of the tongue, as if they had just speared Moby Dick after months of oceanic hardships. If we get exquisite, in the Academy the melancholy of the novelists has won –forgive the redundancy– against the technical knowledge of lexicographers and grammarians, an old problem of all the venerable Rotary clubs when they relax the entry requirements trying to attract heterodox people who encourage the conversation. That so little ink, that insignificant notch on the o, has caused so much to be poured gives the measure of how far a pea under the mattress can disturb the sleep of maidens.
What this pea hides, which for the last thirteen years has kept our spelling princesses awake, is, as always, fear of change. Which, as is well known, is nothing other than fear of death. Because the defenders of the tilde, who today will be recognized for parading through social networks in an advanced and unseemly state of spelling intoxication, had no other true argument than to have learned it in another way. They are that generation that the National-Catholic regime taught history, with the pen of Ricardo de la Cierva, and that lives convinced that in Atapuerca the hominids wore red-and-gold bracelets and reliquaries of the Virgin of Pilar.
Because, although the true and unspeakable motive is to recover what one learned from gourd in the Cuadernos Rubio, the official is even more eloquent about the cultural battle in which we are walking: resolving the risk of ambiguity. Return to what is known since kindergarten and conjure up double meanings, amphibology, the insolent ambiguity of modernity and its androgynous waddles. You don't have to be a lynx to perceive that the princess doesn't have a pea pain but osteoarthritis from too many years, from too many changes. The solotildista, in short, is only afraid of dying. Only.
