Or to put it bluntly, appearances are deceiving. Let's see an example from last week; motion of censure against Pedro Sánchez and, while the candidate Tamames defends in the Congress of Deputies it is not clear whether the past or the future, the leader of the opposition, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, goes to the Swedish embassy and the joke, the parody, the irony, almost writes itself: Feijóo does the Swedish. In other words, he pretends to be clueless or indifferent, procrastinates and pretends that things don't go his way. Everyone understands the expression and more than one must have thought that it could not be a coincidence that Feijóo happened that day, precisely that day, among Swedes.
And, despite this, and despite what some think, it is difficult that the phrase made has anything to do with the Scandinavian country. Rather, it derives from a Latin word, soccus, which has been fruitful and has spread throughout much of Europe. Soccus, in Latin, designated a very simple type of footwear, like a slipper, typical of comedians, a slipper rather than a shoe, and without a doubt much humbler than the clogs worn by actors who performed tragedies. How the Latin soccus came to designate the rustic leather or wooden footwear of the peasants is still a relative mystery for etymologists, but it turns out that the form made a fortune and that it fruited in sock, which is what the English call the sock, for example, and much more clearly in the Spanish zueco, from which other similar words derive, such as zoquete , 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 it has been cut down. That almost dead trunk, although connected to its roots, is also a good metaphor for what we experienced a few days ago, but I better not get into that petrified forest and go back to where I was...
That soccus ended up deriving into a diphthong and giving Swedish is easy to defend due to similarity with the evolution of many other Latin terms. The question would be to know when a phrase began to be used, to make Swedish, which perhaps predates the very existence of the kingdom of Sweden. That being the case, I am inclined to think that to do the Swede was, in Roman paladin, to make one's trunk, to make oneself the trunk of a dead tree, in other words, to make oneself sleepy or insensible. Poor Swedes, who now burden us with a bad reputation of cold and indifferent people that perhaps does not belong to them (although what is more surprising is that the Finns top the ranking of the happiest citizens on the planet year after year).
You see, almost nothing – not to be conceited or maximalist – is what it seems. Much less now, when we live surrounded and scrutinized by all kinds of cameras and microphones, but we are unable to legislate on the new monster that, this time, will mean a truly disruptive change in our lives. Artificial intelligence, still not well regulated, is beginning to rear its hydra head and arouse logical fears and hopes of more profit for a few. Many professions are threatened by a technological revolution that cannot replace the human workforce that still needs their hands (plumbers, you are the future!) but that, through the blockchain, promises to dispense with notaries and registrars or, thanks to an intelligent artificial intelligence that grows day by day, will make translators no longer relevant.
Make your list: truck drivers or railroad drivers, airline pilots, maybe soldiers, even publishers and, why not, journalists. It is already difficult to distinguish what is true news from what is not. And plausibility is the easiest virtue to imitate. We are entering a world of uncertainty barefoot and we would need to go, sorry for abusing the metaphor, very well shod. So that there will continue to be copyright and so that we continue to be the authors of our rights.
