/ kalebeul / 2005 / 05 / 24 / ravalejar /

Ravalejar

Trevor | 24 May 2005 5:31 PM | Les bourgeois

Someone a while back invented a verb that they thought would guerrilla-brand Barcelona’s Raval district and managed to have a fake letter of protest published in La Retaguardia, Barcelona’s favourite sucker rag. Here it is in Googlish:

Nobody that it has taken a walk recently by the Raval will have been able to let notice the presence of posters, even t-shirts and other classic supports of the modern marketing research, which they raise, deliberately austere of manner, a strange word: to ravalejar in Catalan, to ravalear in Castilian. And I say of released because the design is evident that from those posters, and their content tries to send us to the manuals of spelling, the dictionaries, those containers of the linguistic knowledge that give prestige to the language.

Ravalejar is an invented, nonexistent, absurd word. A false and unnecessary word. I do not know what means: to take a walk by the Raval, to live in the Raval, to buy, to eat, to drink, to amuse themselves, to love in the Raval? Or perhaps everything simultaneously? To a false verb it is not possible to attribute to him meant. What we are suggesting to our children: that he is legitimate to create words of the anything, because if ‘? What will be the following thing: to Diagonalear, to Guineuetear, or, perhaps, to SantaColomear?

ANTONIO GUINOVART
Philologist
Barcelona

Nice try, but months into the campaign I’ve still yet to hear anyone using the word.

«« Inexorable force ««
»» Multinationals and US foreign policy »»

Comments

Anonymous sez:
11 March 2008 at 3:11 PM
no escrius massa bé en anglès.
Trevor ap Simon sez:
11 March 2008 at 3:35 PM
Looks like you don’t either, smartypants

Feeds: RSS2 · Atom

Trackback link.

Tell me if the spam dragon gives you a hard time. Log in if you want to be really foul.

Tom on "Catalan on the road to extinction": BNS - you're probably right. It could also be that immigr...
A Nun on How many penguins can you fit in the Generalitat de Cataloonia's London embassy?: The Generalitat has just announced that ordinary operating c...
Trevor on Fame, almost: I'm the giant's understudy. I fear I'm going to have to assa...
Tom on Fame, almost: Gosh the Spanish X-Factor is actually worse than the British...
A Nun on Che el cretino: The obvious historical parallel for Che in Spain is not Sain...
Trevor on "Catalan on the road to extinction": The claim I refuted is not that Moroccans are the largest co...

Ravalejar

Related posts

Comments