A Word of Advice

Connsider the following words of advice addressed to the urban pedestrian:

1. Look both ways when you cross the street.
2. Cross at the green, not in between.

3. 

   Good Advice

Like most advice, these variations on a theme have both an explicit and an implicit component. The explicit component advises you to do or to not do something (or in the case of variant #2, both to do something and to not do something else) while the implicit component predicts the consequences of not following the advice. Here, the explicit message is that you should be careful when you cross the street, and the implicit message is that if you aren’t, you may not make it to the other side safe and sound, a point underlined by the descanso bouquet in variant #3 and the elaboration by the F. B. Washburn Company of variant #2: “Look both ways when you cross the street / so you’ll be around to live and eat/ Waleeco, Waleeco / cocoanut bars are the best I know.” The implicit message rests upon the understanding that from the first decade of the 1900s when the terms were originally minted, jay drivers have always trumped jay walkers—jay in this context signifying a silly or stupid person, so called after the characteristic chattering of the bird of that name.

Sometimes the explicit and implicit are reversed, as in “An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” the implicit advice being to eat an apple a day, the explicit consequence of doing so being good health as evidenced by the absence of house visits from the medical establishment; or “He who hesitates is lost,” loserhood being the spoken consequence of failing to heed the unspoken advice to seize the day. The boundary between advice and proverb is sometimes fuzzy (especially when the advice rhymes, as in variant #2). So are most of the boundaries between adjacent neighbors on the continuum of (expressed) opinion, advice, exhortation, admonition, warning, threat, and command(ment). Indeed, the word advice comes to us through French (cf. Modern French avis ‘opinion,’ Spanish aviso ‘warning’), ultimately from a reworking of the Latin expression vīsum est mihi ‘it looks/seems to me,’ vīsum being a nominal form of the past participle of the verb vidēre ‘to see.’ The differences are basically in the degree of firmness with which an opinion is articulated (and its following is urged), and these differences can be difficult for the recipient to decode, all the more so at second hand.

For example, imagining yourself in Adam’s place, what are you to make of the different renderings in Genesis 2:16-17 of the advice concerning the tree of knowledge? The King James Bible reads “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying Of every tree in the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” The New English Bible has “He told the man, ‘You may eat from every tree in the garden, but not from the tree of knowledge of good and evil; for on the day that you eat from it, you will certainly die.'” St. Jerome’s fourth-century Latin (Vulgate) version is not altogether illuminating: “praecepitque ei dicens: Ex omni ligno paradisi comede; de ligno autem scientiae boni et mali ne comedas; in quocumque enim die comederis ex eo, morte morieris.”  One standard dictionary glosses praecipere as ‘to give rules, advise, admonish, warn, inform, instruct, teach, enjoin, direct, bid, order,’ from which the following imperative comede (‘Eat!’) suggests we can rule out the warmer and fuzzier items here, though the injunction to not eat (ne comedas) is a form of the (hortatory) subjunctive and, as such, weaker than an out an out order.

The threat of fatal consequences is clear enough in all tellings, though the fact that Adam did not die immediately after eating the forbidden fruit (showing that the consequences of heeding or failing to heed advice don’t always turn out as predicted) could be taken as a sign of forgiveness for his confusion over whether he had been told rather than commanded (or advised, admonished, warned…) to restrict his diet. The fact that in the Hebrew version וַיְצַו [vayitsav] is unambiguously ‘commanded,’ and the injunction against eating from the tree of knowledge (ל תֹּאכֵל [lo tochal] ‘Do not eat!’) is definitely an imperative is not much help for Adam’s monolingual English-speaking (or even bilingual English- and Latin-speaking) avatar when all is said and done.

The advice offered to Adam was unsolicited, was delivered orally (as writing had not yet been invented), and Adam, being at that time the earth’s sole human inhabitant, was the only possible recipient and beneficiary of that advice. Variants #1 and #2 are typically unsolicited and delivered orally as well but are sometimes addressed to a group rather than to an individual. By contrast, the unsolicited advice of variant #3 is delivered in writing and intended for any and all literate street-crossers who find themselves at the intersection. So, what about solicited advice (in oral or written form to the one or the many)? As a form of social interaction, the active solicitation and subsequent delivery of advice can be fairly complex. In its simplest form, a human being A asks another human being B for advice, and B responds:

Bad Advice

In our next viabrevis posting (“The Agony and the Exposition”), we’ll look at a familiar elaboration of this scenario in which advice is sought and dispensed quasianonymously through the medium of print. Our advice: Stay tuned.

 

A Cautionary Note

Here’s an exercise for the student: What, exactly, is the message that the PLOWS USE CAUTION sign is intended to convey? Three possibilities come immediately to mind:

1. People who drive plows do so cautiously. This is a simple matter-of-fact statement like SLIPPERY WHEN WET:

or the epimenidian NO TRAFFIC SIGNS:

Well, actually NO TRAFFIC SIGNS is ambiguous, as it could be read either as an assertion—There are no traffic signs up ahead, so you’re going to be on your own—or an imperative—Don’t post any traffic signs here [other than this one]. The same, for that matter, could be said of the iconographic version of the SLIPPERY WHEN WET sign:

which could just as well be read as a warning to look out for drunk drivers. So, perhaps a better example of a declarative would be WRONG WAY:

2. Watch out for plows! This message is a warning to the effect that you may encounter plows in the area and, if you do, you are advised to give them wide berth. Here, “USE” is to be taken as an imperative addressed to you who are presumably using a means of locomotion—car, bike, feet—less formidable than a plow (let alone a herd of plows). Compare the imperative DO NOT ENTER:

or the archetypical STOP:

though, as noted in the discussion of détournement in our Short Cuts: A Guide to Oaths, Ring Tones, Ransom Notes, Famous Last Words, & Other Forms of Minimalist Communication, “STOP” is ambiguous to the extent that it can be parsed as either a noun or a verb, which can be construed as intransitive or transitive, its object (yourself, your vehicle) being implied or made explicit by creative (if typically unsanctioned) embellishment, e.g.,

3. Hey, you guys driving the plows, be careful! Here again, “USE” is an imperative, but the addressees are plow drivers, not the motorist/cyclist/pedestrian.

So, how might we determine which of these three readings is the intended one, given the constraints on traffic signage promulgated by the Federal Highway Administration in its Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) that include the admonition that “word messages should not contain punctuation, apostrophes, question marks, ampersands, or other characters that are not letters or numerals unless absolutely necessary to avoid confusion” and an almost impenetrable set of instructions governing the terseness and chunking of such messages (see “Section 2M.05 Message Length and Units of Information” at http://www.trafficsign.us/npa/part02compl.pdf)?

 Supposing for the moment that you were unable or sufficiently unsporting to do the obvious, namely: google “plows use caution,” look at the first hit [http://boston.cbslocal.com/2011/12/14/plows-use-caution-sign-necessity-or-waste-of-money/], and call it a day, you might with confidence rule out reading #1 (the assertion of fact) on the grounds that not only is reading #1 silly, the shape of the sign and its background color are those conventionally associated with a warning—see, for example the current specifications for highway signage in Massachusetts (http://www.mass.gov/rmv/mcmanual/20_TrafficSigns.pdf ), which, like those of the other states, have evolved from the standards proposed by the members of the Mississippi Valley Association of State Highway Departments in 1923 who, according to historian Gordon Sessions, “agreed on a signing-and-marking plan which was destined to become the basis of the national standards agreed upon two years later” (see his Traffic Devices: Historical Aspects Thereof). The group proposed restricting signage to the following six shapes: round (to mark railroad crossings), octagonal (to signify “stop”), diamond (for regulatory information), square (for caution and “attention”), rectangle (for directional and regulatory information), and “route markers of some characteristic or conventional shape different from the above.” Lettering was to be black on a white background.

In 1925, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHO) proposed “to introduce into the caution signs a series of distinctions which would indicate different degrees of danger,” in descending order of potential danger: circle for railroad crossings, octagon for “Stop,” diamond for “ordinary conditions of danger requiring precaution on the part of the driver at all times,” square “to be used where the dangerous condition is intermittent and involves little more than ordinary care or attention in driving.” All of these signs were to have black lettering on a yellow background. The STOP sign would wait to get its white lettering on a red background until 1955 by which time the science of industrial chemistry had evolved to make possible the development of a red pigment that would withstand inclement weather.

In addition to the STOP sign’s white-on-red makeover, the 1950s saw the introduction of the YIELD sign:

to which may be compared the STOP  sign formerly in use in England:

and the STOP sign still in use in Japan:

This new (to the US) shape and message betoken the evolution from the basically rural  society in which the first traffic signs appeared, thanks largely to the early recreational automobile clubs of the 1920s, to the increasingly urban and trafficky world in which we operate today. Small wonder that there is some confusion in the ever-proliferating traffic signage between the levels of danger originally encoded by the yellow-backed diamond, square, and rectangle:

And, yes,  there is an alternate reading of this message available at http://www.roadtrafficsigns.com/, perhaps a reflection of the snarkiness surely absent from the good old days of rural America that preceded the invention of the internal combustion engine:

But back to PLOWS USE CAUTION. Color and shape—not to mention the word CAUTION—clearly suggest that somebody’s caution is strongly advised. But whose? Here, context provides an important hint:

The setting is clearly urban, so we may guess that the kind of plows involved are the kind used to remove snow (as opposed to the kind used for tilling fields). As it happens, another piece of contextual information is offered by the railing of the highway overpass in the center of the view. This is in fact the MacGuffin in the story in which snow plow drivers are warned take it easy as they go about their business so as not to dump snow onto the unsuspecting vehicular traffic below.

 

The Do Re Mi

Fa-re-mi-do

“How miraculous is the effect of music! As if someone pounded on the door of our soul from outside, from the world of Beauty and Reality; but we no longer understand the voice. It is this language they speak in Faremido.”

So begins Frigyes Karinthy’s Voyage to Faremido: Gulliver’s Fifth Voyage, originally published in Hungarian as Utazás Faremidóba: Gulliver ötödik útja in 1916. When his combat ship strikes a mine, Gulliver escapes by hydroplane and eventually lands on a planet whose inhabitants are sentient machines, one of which (whom?) befriends him: “Now and then it turned to me its gleaming, golden metal head; a bluish light shone upon me from the brilliant eyes; then it started to sing, and now I felt clearly that it was addressing me with these sounds; that in this country the language was made up of music, and that the words consisted of musical phrases. As soon as I realized this, I tried to make it understand that I would like to learn the language. Pointing repeatedly at the palace, I mimed my desire to know its name. The machine immediately caught my meaning and replied: mi-fa-re — which I repeated at once. … I now started to point out various objects, identifying each by its name, and I continued to repeat the sounds. It pointed to itself and sang: so-la-si. Then with a sweeping gesture that embraced the whole horizon it told me: fa-re-mi-do — the phrase I had already heard when I first landed in the place. Now I knew that the country was called Faremido. (I must ask the reader to sing these words rather than read them silently or pronounce them aloud; this is the only way they make sense.)”

Frigyes  Karinthy (1887-1938) was not the first to envision a language constructed from the seven tones of the major diatonic scale—think the white keys of the piano starting on C—named (or, solmized as) do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, and si (or ti), though he could legitimately claim to have been the first to translate Winnie the Pooh and Gulliver’s Travels into Hungarian and to have originated the theory of “six degrees of separation,” which posits (in the short story “Chains” http://djjr-courses.wdfiles.com/local–files/soc180%3Akarinthy-chain-links/Karinthy-Chain-Links_1929.pdf) that any two people on earth will share a common acquaintance no more than five intermediate acquaintances away. For precursors, we need search no farther than Jean-François Sudre (1787-1862), whose posthumously published [1865] Langue musicale universelle inventée par François Sudre également inventeur de la téléphonie [‘Universal Musical Language Invented by François Sudre, Likewise the Inventor of Telephony’] lays out his proposal for a “universal musical language,” which he introduces as follows: “I have thus enclosed all ideas within the seven notes of music; I have expressed them as combinations that are easy to remember, and I have formed of them a language that is accessible to all minds [intelligences] and all peoples of the world. It is by no means a translation of the French language that is to be looked for in this work, since ideas belong to the domain of all languages.”  (http://www.labirintoermetico.com/12ArsCombinatoria/lingue_universali/Gajewski_B_Grammaire_du_SolReSol_Sudre.pdf) Basically, what Sudre had in mind was a language in which all human thought could be expressed by various sequences of the seven notes of the major scale. He dubbed this language Solrésol, the musical sequence sol+re+sol signifying ‘language’ in his system.

 Solresol evolved from an earlier system devised by M Sudre for which he coined the term téléphonie (‘telephony’). An editorial in the Supplement to the Musical Library of March – Dec. 1834 refers—somewhat disparagingly—to “the telephone of M. Sudré,” about which the writer says, “By the sounds of a violin, a pianoforte, a trumpet, &c., he proposes to accomplish what the telegraph does by figures or colours. Hence the word Telephone, from τηλε, far, at a distance, and φωνη, sound, which however is not quite appropriate, in whatever way considered.” Sudre’s “Telephone” was essentially aural semaphore, a system for encoding alphabetic letters as notes of the dodecaphonic (twelve-tone) scale over multiple octaves. The subsequent notion that musical notes could be used for the encoding of a universal semantic system was an inspired (if perhaps overly ambitious) leap forward. 

Mindful of the criticism raised against téléphonie that its successful employment presupposed at least minimal musical ability on the part of the conversants, Sudre and his followers provided a variety of nonmusical way of representing the canonical seven tones on which the language was built. Couturat and Leau in their 1903 Histoire de la langue universelle list these as “1. One can utter or write  the international names of these notes, or just their initials (s = sol, so = sol); 2. One can sing them or play them on whatever musical instrument; 3. One can write them on a musical staff; 4. One can represent them by seven special stenographic signs, whether written or drawn in the air with a finger; 5. One can represent them by the first seven Arabic numerals, or by corresponding numbers of sonorous beats, of tactile pressures, etc.; 6. One can represent them by the seven colors of the spectrum (lights, lanterns, flares, etc.); 7. Finally, one can designate them by touching the index finger of the right hand to the four fingers of the left hand or the spaces between them (which thus represent the musical staff).” Thus:

Solresol Manual

There is some disagreement as to where to locate Do on the hand. Some illustrations show it near the wrist, though elsewhere (e.g., http://faculty.las.illinois.edu/csandvig/classes/solresolpdf) it’s in the fist. In any case,  Sudre was not the first to associate the notes of the diatonic scale with different parts of the hand. That particular honor is generally considered to have gone to Guido D’Arezzo (ca. 990 – 1050) who is also credited with inventing do-re-mi-fa-sol-la solmization—originally, ut-re-mi-fa-sol-la, the initial syllables of the words Ut, resonare, mira, famuli, solve, and labii in the hymn to St. John the Baptist sung at Vespers as part of the Divine Office on the saint’s nativity day (June 24):

Ut-re-mi-fa-sol-la

The ascending notes on which the syllables ut (later replaced by the more mellifluous do), re, mi, fa, sol, and la fall in this hymn constitute a hexachord, a basic building block in medieval Western music consisting of a sequence of a whole tone plus a whole tone plus a semitone plus a whole tone plus a whole tone (T-T-S-T-T), e.g., C-D-E-F-G. By overlapping the hexachords starting with G, C, and F and working your way up the pitch ladder, you could derive all the tones needed for modal (“white-key”) music (with “black-key” b flat thrown in for good measure). Guido D’Arezzo proposed the following mnemonic for this system:

The Guidonian Hand

The bottom note (called the gamma ut) is at the tip of your thumb. (Gamut eventually came to be used as a term for the whole range of notes; to run the gamut was to traverse the whole system from bottom to top.) The Guidonian system proceeds from the gamma ut down the thumb, then along the first joints of fingers, up the pinky finger, across the tips of the fingers, down the index finger to the second joint, across the second joints of the middle and ring finger, across the first joints of the ring and third fingers, and off into the ozone. Feel free to try this at home.

Finally, before calling it a day, Guido D’Arezzo seems to have invented the musical staff (originally four lines) and two moveable clefs (basically a paper-saving device that allowed the notes to stay within the staff), one to signify the location of C and the other the location of F:

Guidonian Fa-re-mi-do

 

 

Off to the Races

Casta Paintings

On September 21, 2012, the Boston Globe offered the following account of an interchange videotaped at a fund-raiser for presidential candidate Mitt Romney:

 “When he [Mitt Romney] lamented that his father was born in Mexico to American parents—‘Had he been born of Mexican parents, I’d have a better shot of winning this’—a female donor spoke up.

 ‘You can pull an Elizabeth Warren,’ she said.

 Romney explained to the audience, ‘Elizabeth Warren, she’s the woman who’s running for US Senate in Massachusetts who said she’s Cherokee.’

 ‘It turns out that at most she’s 1/32d Cherokee,” Romney added. “And even that can’t be proven. So, in any event, I mean I could put down my dad was born in Mexico and leave it at that.’”

There are several take-aways here for both political pundits and sociolinguists (not to mention prospective voters).  Mr. Romney’s interlocutrix suggests that he could garner a larger share of the increasingly important Latino vote by claiming to have had a Mexican parent.  Presumably the suggestion is facetious, given the considerable negative hay Ms. Warren’s Republican opponent has attempted to make of her assertion of having had Native Americans among her Oklahoman ancestors.  Mr. Romney’s response (presumably equally light-heartedly) acknowledges his father’s Mexican birth to American ex-pats and essentially dismisses the idea of pursuing the matter for political gain, thereby avoiding the possible accusation that his father had actually been an anchor baby.

For the political pundit, how candidates for public office choose to handle the presentation of their and their opponents’ racial and ethnic backgrounds for good or ill is a general subject of interest on which the fund-raiser dialog provides some focused illumination. For the sociolinguist, what is equally of interest are the ways in which the relationship between race (genetics) and ethnicity (culture) is construed by campaigners, the news media, and the general public—as a thought experiment, try substituting, say, “Canadian” for “Mexican” and see how your mental image changes.

 Mexico, like the other New-World Spanish colonies, was originally both multicultural and, as its indigenous population was joined by the arrival of (white) Europeans in the early 1500s and, shortly thereafter, (black) Africans, multiracial as well. And these canonical groups—indios, españoles or blancos, and negros or moros (literally, ‘Indians,’ ‘Spanish’ or ‘Whites,’ and ‘Blacks’ or ‘Moors’)—were themselves culturally heterogeneous groups: Indio could designate a member of any of a variety of quite distinct native societies (Aztec, Mayan, Chichimeca, etc.), españoles or blancos could refer equally to white Europeans (a.k.a. gachupines) or their white New-World progeny (a.k.a. criollos), while a negro or moro could be a black person who was the product of one or another of several African societies or was born in the New World, the word moro in either case having been repurposed from its original sense in (European) Spanish, where (according to Gómez de Silva’s Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua española) it referred to “a member of the Muslim community of mixed Berber and Arabian origin chiefly inhabiting northern Africa,” the region known in Roman times as Mauritania (Greek Μαυρουσία).  

 As indios, blancos, and negros mingled and produced multiracial offspring who in turn mingled and reproduced, the Old-World Spanish rulers attempted to pigeonhole the members of the increasingly complex New-World population mix through a system of nomenclature that assigned a name to (theoretically) each of the possible types of offspring of each possible pairing of existing racial types. The system was known as the sistema de castas, your casta (from Latin castus, -a, -um ‘pure, unpolluted,’ whence English chaste as well as caste) being your racial type, an identifier of the percentage of indio, blanco, and negro ancestry which you inherited as your birthright. The definition of a casta had in addition to its genetic component an overlay of associated social attributes that, in theory if not in actual practice, characterized your legal rights (e.g., what part of town you could live in and whether you could carry arms) and the range of professions open to you. Period paintings of parents-cum-child showing idealized casta physical features, dress, and  accoutrements were all the rage as souvenirs to take back to Europe after a trip to the New World, post cards and the Kodak Brownie having yet to be invented.

A Colonial Family

The number of possible castas was obviously considerable: From the six possible indio/blanco/negro X india/blanca/negra pairs, you get six different offspring types (indio X india = indio; indio X blanca = mestizo; indio X negra = zambo; blanco X blanca = blanco; blanco X negra = mulato; negro X negra = negro); from a like pairing of these six, you get 21 different types of offspring; from 21, you get 231; and so on. (Mathematically, we’re calculating the sum of N where N is the number of offspring types—three, six, 21, and so on—the formula for which is X =  N * (N+1) /2 in case you’d like to try this at home.)  The following table shows a portion of the system, where parents appear to the left and right of the X immediately above their offspring:

Family Tree

You do not have to do much of the math to figure that there must have been quite a few empty slots in the system (which was finally abandoned in the early 1800s during the Latin American wars of independence) between those occupied by the first couple and the one occupied by their possible albarazado descendent (who could reckon himself 8/128 indio, 75/128 blanco, and 45/128 negro should he be interviewed on the campaign trail). Part of the explanation for these lacunae involves the way in which the system viewed the “whitening” (blanquesimiento) of the indio population:

Blanquesimiento

Thus, if you were 7/8 blanco and 1/8 indio, you were considered blanco and got to start all over again. Not so if seven of your great-grandparents were blancos and the other was a negro or negra:

Family Tree Variant

In this case, instead of collecting $200 and passing Go, you were as an albino, etymologically “white”—the standard Spanish term for  “white” is blanco, ultimately of Germanic origin, while albo (Latin albus ‘white’) has been largely restricted to poetic use—but socially tainted, however slightly.  The reasons for the disparity were several, genetics and actual physical appearance being, apparently, somewhat less important than the original relative numbers of indios, blancos, and negros and whether they were considered aristocracy, serfs, or slaves: Originally indios, both male and female, far outnumbered the blanco population, which was exclusively male; both societies were based on the estate system consisting of an aristocracy plus everybody else, two factors that facilitated the integration of indios with blancos and mitigated against the enslavement (if not the exploitation) of the former by the latter. Negros were imported as slave labor later to make up for the loss of the indigenous workforce due in large part to disease. Their numbers were relatively small.

The differences between the lineages in Family Tree and Family Tree Variant tell another part of the story.  First, while everybody seems to agree on the meaning of the terms español, negro, mulato, and morisco, terminology starts to vary when it comes to naming the next generation—albino or chino. (The term chino is most probably from china, a Quechua word meaning “female, woman.”) Second, there is some confusion as to the lineage of the salta atrás (literally, ‘jump back’ though perhaps ‘throw-back’ would be more apt), the parents being an albino/chino and either a blanca or an india. In fact, after the third generation, casta terminology tends to get rather fast and loose, suggesting that for all practical purposes nobody (with the possible exception of the souvenir portrait painters) actually kept track of more than three generations of  casta differentiation and probably fewer than that, given the general lack of contemporary genealogical documentation beyond oral tradition, the practice of rounding up (“passing”), and the refocusing of political power from Spain to the eventually independent colonies in which, while as far as skin color goes the light end of the color spectrum is still to some extent advantaged, centuries of intermarriage have rendered the sistema de castas mercifully irrelevant.

The Extended Family

 

 

 

 

Snakes, Horses, and Universal Grammar

“To lead a snake to school is nothing; to make it sit down is what’s hard.” This Haitian Creole proverb—Mennen koulèv al lekòl pa anyen; se fè’l chita ki rèd—has a well-known English counterpart: “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink,” though it is a safe bet that the perverb derived from the latter—“You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think,” like “One man’s mate is another man’s person” or “A Bool and his algebra are soon parted”—belongs uniquely to the Anglophone community.

 Terms: A perverb is a proverb that has been subjected to a kind of verbal détournement by adding, subtracting, or otherwise altering its component parts. A proverb has been variously defined as “a simple and concrete saying popularly known and repeated, which expresses a truth, based on common sense or the practical experience of humanity. They are often metaphorical. A proverb that describes a basic rule of conduct may also be known as a maxim. If a proverb is distinguished by particularly good phrasing, it may be known as an aphorism”
[http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/paremiology] and “a short, generally known sentence of the folk which contains wisdom, truth, morals, and traditional views in a metaphorical, fixed and memorizable form and which is handed down from generation to generation” [Wofgang Mieder, Proverbs are Never out of Season] to which may be compared the Mercedes Benz of a gloss offered by Le Petit Robert—known to its friends as Le ‘Ti Bob—for proverbe:  “Formule présentant des caractères formels stables, souvent métaphorique ou figurée et exprimant une vérité d’experience ou un conseil de sagesse pratique et populaire, commun à tout un groupe social. >adage, aphorisme, dicton, maxime, pensée, sentence; parémiologie.”  That is, ‘a formula exhibiting stable formal characteristics, often metaphorical or figurative and expressing an experiential truth or a piece of advice drawn from practical and popular wisdom, shared by all members of a social group. > adage, aphorism, saying [dicton], maxim, thought, dictum [sentence, ‘a thought—especially on a moral point—expressed in a dogmatic, literary manner’]; par(o)emiology [i.e., the study of proverbs, from Greek. παροιμία ‘common saying, old saw’ (of the saga, rather than scythe family), ultimately from πάροιμος ‘by the roadside’].

That said, what is to be made of the commonality of the Creole and English proverb(s) next to the language-specificity of its (English-only)  perverb? Universal grammarians, from the Modistae of the Middle Ages to the transformationalists of the present day, might conclude from all of this that the semantic content of the Creole and English proverbs—their deep structure so to speak—is basically the same while its actual expression—the surface structure—differs according to the specific language,  while perverbs involve a play on a specific language’s surface structure (with some fancy mapping from the result to the appropriate semantic underlay). So, the view of language that posits a universally shared semantics realized differently in different languages is arguably bolstered by the evidence and is certainly not contradicted by it. Others might argue, however, that since proverbs reflect the human condition generally, the fact that some common aspect of human behavior should elicit common reactions encoded in differently worded proverbs in different cultures should neither come as a surprise nor be taken as evidence in support of a universal grammar: Aspects of  human experience may be universal, but that doesn’t mean we’re all dealt the same set of semantic cards, let alone subject to the same set of rules governing how to play them.

The origin of Haitian Creole itself (like that of other creole languages) is subject to similar debate, in which there are three major contenders: Universalists hold that the language evolved on its own, taking as its semantic base the one shared by all other natural languages and cobbling together its surface structure from the spare parts provided by the colonial and native languages at hand. By contrast,  proponents of the “substrate” school suggest that Creole has one or another or some combination of African languages as its grammatical (and presumably semantic) base on which lexical and other linguistic features of the colonial language (in this case French) have been superimposed. Finally, the “superstrate” school proposes that a creole language’s grammatical base is some nonstandard flavor of the colonial language that has been influenced by various of the native languages originally spoken by the people on whom the colonial language was imposed.

Claiming to not have a dog in the race, we invoke Wittgenstein’s seventh proposition (“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen,” roughly, ‘You can’t talk about what you can’t talk about,’ i.e., some realms can’t really be explored with the kind of language humans have at their disposal) and return from the realm of the ultimately unknowable to a brief sampling of Creole and English proverbs from which you are free to draw whatever conclusions you like about universality, culture binding, borrowing, independent innovation, and the human condition.

Examples: There are many ways in both Creole and English to express the notion that cooperation is a good thing. Many hands make light work, It takes two wings to fly—It takes two to tango, an observation first attested in a song composed in 1952, often expresses a negative view of the act of cooperation, while the notion that There’s no “I” in “team” is typically an exhortation to suppress one’s individuality in the interests of the group, a milder and more nuanced variant being There’s no “I” in “polyphony.” Creole’s offerings by the same token include Men anpil, chay pa lou (‘[With] many hands, the load isn’t heavy’), Akoz diri, ti wòch goute grès (‘Thanks to the rice, pebbles have their share of fat,’ i.e., taste good); Se de bon ki fè bonbon (‘[It takes] two good people to make a cookie’ or, as we might say, to bake a cake), and Yon sèl dwèt pa manje kalalou (‘You can’t eat okra with just one finger’). And, as is often the case with proverbs, the opposite sentiment also has its common expression: Too many cooks spoil the broth and the (St. Lucien) Creole Twòp kwizinye, sòs gate (‘Too many cooks, the sauce is spoiled’).

For better or ill, we inherit something from our parents. Like father, like son; The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree; Joumou pa donnen kalbas (‘A pumpkin doesn’t produce a calabash’). But Beauty is no inheritance, Handsome is as handsome does, and in any caseYou shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, to the last of which we may compare Creole Je wouj pa boule kay (literally, ‘Red eyes don’t burn the house down’). A new broom sweeps clean (Balè nef ka bale byen), and it’s a toss whether an old broom knows the corners or is worthless (English favoring the former, French the latter), but in any event, All things must come to an end: Tout priyè gen Amen (‘Every prayer has an Amen’).

 

What’s in a Namesake?

Los Tocayos Carlos

On December 7, 1989, having been convicted of the 1983 murder of  a woman named Wanda López, Carlos DeLuna became the thirty-third person to be executed in Texas after the state’s reinstitution of the death penalty in 1982. (As of August 7, 2012, Texas has performed an additional 451 executions since DeLuna’s.) In 2003, members of Columbia Law School’s Innocence Project began an investigation of DeLuna’s case, eventually concluding that it was not DeLuna who had killed Wanda López but, rather, a man named Carlos Hernández. (Hernández died in prison in 1999 while serving a sentence for unrelated crimes.) The Innocence Project released its report, Los Tocayos Carlos: An Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution (http://www3.law.columbia.edu/hrlr/ltc/) in the Spring of 2012, causing considerable stir and gaining substantial coverage in the news media at home and abroad (see, e.g., http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/15/carlos-texas-innocent-man-death).

So, why “Los Tocayos Carlos?” The short answer is that the murderer and the man convicted of the crime were both Latinos named “Carlos” and in Spanish the word tocayos refers to people who share the same name—Carlos DeLuna was Carlos Hernández’s tocayo, and vice versa, by virtue of their both being named “Carlos.” But more to the point, the word tocayo expresses a relationship that, for many speakers of English, the usual Spanish-English dictionary gloss—‘namesake’—fails to encompass and for whom “The Carlos Namesakes” would imply that DeLuna and Hernández were both named after someone (possibly two different people) named Carlos, not that they shared a common name. Compare, for example, the entry for namesake in the fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary—“One that is named after another. [< the phrase for the name’s sake.]”—with the corresponding entry in the on-line Oxford English Dictionary—“A. n. A person who or a thing which has the same name as another. B. adj. That shares the same name as someone or something else previously mentioned. Now chiefly N. Amer.” Other (North American) dictionaries offer the combo platter: The venerable Century Dictionary of 1890 glosses namesake as “One who is named after or for the sake of another; hence, one who has the same name as another,” while the Random House Dictionary of the English Language (1971) has “1. A person named after another. 2. A person having the same name as another.”

The OED observes with respect to the origin of the word namesake (which it dates to the 1600s) that “This compound may have arisen from earlier phrases such as for one’s name(‘s) sake, for name sake,” and gives as its first definition of the phrase for the sake of; for (one’s, a thing’s) sake as “Out of consideration for; on account of one’s interest in, or regard for (a person); on (a person’s) account.” (Compare the keepsake you bought to remind you of your trip to Vegas, a place that some consider Godforsaken, a place that God has put out of mind.)  The OED dates the phrase from the thirteenth century, which suggests that the “named-after” sense of namesake given by the AHD and others is closer to the original meaning and that the more general definition given by the OED (and echoed as secondary senses by other dictionaries) represents an extension of the relationship to the one embodied in Spanish tocayo.

Like the debate over the source of syphilis (see https://viabrevis.wordpress.com/2012/02/15/pox-and-pains-stage-2/) the origin of the word tocayo involves a face-off between the New World and the Old. Partisans of the New World origin derive tocayo from Nahuatl tocaitl ‘name, renown’ or the verb tocayona ‘to name someone, to call by name,’ or the like. The chief Old World alternative derives tocayo from a phrase customarily spoken by the bride in a Roman wedding, Ubi tu Caius, ibi ego Caia ‘Where you [are known as] Caius, there I [will be known as] Caia,’ the groom’s response being Ubi tu Caia, ibi ego Caius ‘Where you [are known as] Caia, there I [will be known as] Caius,’ Caia being the feminine form of Caius, one of the most common of Roman first names (praenomina).

So, what’s the evidence? The case for deriving tocayo from Ubi tu Caius/Caia seems to be that there’s no compelling reason not to prefer it over the (arguably problematic) New world hypothesis (see, e.g., Joan Corominas’s Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico), that Roman legal terminology has sometimes been preserved archaically in Modern Romance (see, e.g., Guido Gómez de Silva’s Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua española), and teasing a single word out of a foreign phrase, while rare, is not unknown (cf. Spanish brindis ‘[a] toast’ from German [Ich] bring’ dir ’s—‘I bring this to you’—or French vasistas ‘transom’ from German Was ist das?—’What’s that?’).

 In addition, the gloss for tocayo offered in Capt. John Stevens’s A New Spanish and English Dictionary (published in London in 1706), the earliest occurrence of the word in print that has so far come to light, may be entered as Exhibit A. Stevens glosses tocayo simply as “namesake” with no further comment as to its language of origin, while his entry for the word cacao (“The Nut whereof chocolate is made…”) concludes with the information that  “The greatest plenty is in the Province of Guatimala. The Name is Indian. F. Fos. Acos. Nat. Hist. Ind. Lib. 4. Chap. 22. Pag. 250.” Ergo, by not saying that tocayo is “Indian,” we may assume that its origin is Old World.

Arguing for the defense of the New World hypothesis, the forensic lexicographer notes that the derivation of tocayo from Ubi tu Caius/Caia is, on the face of it, rather a stretch both phonologically and semantically, and the evidence from Stevens is shaky at best: Stevens’s entries for such New World terms as tlixochitl (“An herb in New Spain…The Spaniards call them Baynillas from their shape, because they are like small sheathes or scabbards…”), chocolate (“Chocolat; well known, and therefore needs no more to be said.”), and tomates (“A sort of red fruit growing in Spain, not known in England…”) are not explicitly identified as “Indian” words. Indeed, in his introduction, which identifies the various sources from which Spanish has derived its vocabulary—Latin, Arabic, Gothic, French, Greek—Stevens makes no mention whatever of any New World languages, and one suspects that the cacao reference was borrowed from the cited source.

But perhaps the best evidence for the New World hypothesis is not that the opposition’s case is weak but (a) the Nahuatl derivation is plausible on both phonological and semantic grounds and (b) Brazilian Portuguese has two terms synonymous with Spanish tocayo: tocaio (borrowed from Spanish) and the more widely used xará, whose derivation from Tupí xe’rer (‘my name’) is completely noncontroversial, suggesting that the whole notion of the general same-name-as relationship was one whose monolexical expression first appeared in the New World, a hypothesis bolstered by the lack of such a term (other than some variant of homonym) in the other Romance languages.

You be the judge.

 

A Guy Thing

A Guy

“Who was that guy?” The original guy (in the sense of ‘anonymous male’) is generally considered to have been Guy Fawkes, best remembered for his role in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. The Gunpowder Plot (also known in less politically correct times as the Jesuit Treason) was a conspiracy aimed at removing the Protestant king James (the First of England, the Sixth of Scotland) and replacing him with his Catholic daughter, the princess Elizabeth. The first part of the operation was to have been effected by blowing up the House of Lords when Parliament opened on November 5. Thanks to an anonymous tip, the plot was foiled at the last minute, Guy Fawkes was caught tending the explosives that the conspirators had put in place under the House of Lords, and he and his coconspirators were summarily tried and sentenced to be hung, drawn, and quartered, a punishment reserved at the time for men convicted of high treason. (Fawkes apparently managed to avoid the gruesome drawing and quartering parts, which were supposed to follow the convict’s partial hanging, by suicidally jumping from the scaffold.) The following January, Parliament passed the Thanksgiving Act (officially, the “Observance of 5th November Act 1605”), subsequently celebrated (at least by British Protestants) with antipapist sermonizing, bonfires, effigy burning, and interfaith rioting.  The Observance of 5th November Act 1605 was effectively repealed by the passage of the Anniversary Days Observance Act in 1859, though the night of November 5, by then long known as Guy Fawkes Night, is still celebrated to this day, resembling more a British version of Halloween than Thanksgiving. The corresponding November 5 “Pope’s Day” festivities in Colonial America pretty much fizzled out after General Washington admonished the citizenry to look kindly, ignoring issues of religion, on their French-speaking allies in Québec who in 1774 had just been granted the right to practice their faith.

So, how do we get from the eponymous Guy to the generic guy? The story goes like this: A standard feature of Guy Fawkes Night celebrations was the effigy—sometimes of Guy Fawkes though sometimes of the pope or other noteworthy figure held in disrepute—called a guy, presumably getting its initial lower case when the effigies became generic.

Exploding Judases

To get from guy as ‘bad/grotesque male effigy’ to ‘bad/grotesque male person’ is easy enough (though it apparently took until the early 1800s to do so in print).  From there, it’s a hop, skip, and a jump to guy as ‘generic male’ (“every guy needs a girl,” Guys and Dolls), ‘specific male whose name we don’t know or aren’t using at the moment’ (“that guy in the photo is my uncle Joe,” the Guy upstairs—presumably the low-church version of the high-church Man upstairs), and, in the plural, ‘unnamed people of unspecified gender’ (“Hey, guys, let’s party,” which could be addressed to a group of males, females, or a mix of males and females), extensions of meaning all born in the U.S.A. beginning in the mid to late 1800s and extending into the mid 1900s.

Of course, Guy isn’t the only person’s name that has been pressed into service as a stand-in for ‘generic male’ (or ‘generic male with a vaguely negative social pong,’ which along with residual associations with Mr. Fawkes himself made the name a relative rarity until the early 20^th century as one you’d actually give your kid): A john, for example, is a prostitute’s client, a mark is the target of a scam, while Tom, Dick, and Harry (who at least retain the dignity of their initial caps) are at best ordinary folk (often qualified by any as if to underline their commonness). Indeed, even the upper case initial caps have a tendency to be replaced by their more modest lower case counterparts when Tom, Dick, and Harry go to Spain (as fulano, mengano, y zutano, sometimes joined by their tag-along friend perengano) or Italy (as tizio, caio, e sempronio, sometimes with mevio, filano e calpurnio bringing up the rear).

Tom, Dick, and Harry (Spanish)

Fulano (to which the Italian filano bears a suspicious resemblance) is a borrowing from Arabic fulān, which Gómez de Silva glosses (in his Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua española) as ‘a person or thing whose name is not expressed,’ and can be used stand-alone (unlike mengano, zutano, or perengano, which always appear in a group) with the sense of ‘so-and-so, an unspecified person or thing’ (though the grammatically feminine form, fulana, has the sense of ‘slut, painted lady’); fulano de tal and fulana de tal are essentially ‘what’s-his-name’ and ‘what’s-her-name’ or ‘John and Jane Doe,’ respectively. Mengano is possibly also from Arabic man kan ‘whoever,’ while zutano is probably a made-up name based on fulano and mengano. (Presumabaly likewise the later perengano.)

 The canonical Italian Tom, Dick, and Harry—tizio, caio, e sempronio—are the direct descendents of three stock  stalwarts of  the corpus of medieval commentary on Roman civil law, much like the ubiquitous A, B, and C of mathematics primers of the early 1900s (as in Stephen Leacock’s “A lays a wager that he can walk faster than B or C. A can walk half as fast again as B, and C is only an indifferent walker. Find how far, and so forth.” http://www.online-literature.com/stephen-leacock/literary-lapses/40/). The three, whose creation is generally attributed to the twelfth-century Bolognese legal scholar Irnerius, were Titius, Caius, and Sempronius.

Tom, Dick, and Harry in a Roman Law Book

For example, a commentator on contract law might give as an example of in gratiam mandantis et manditarii Sempronius authorizing Titius to lend money to Caius at some rate of interest with the expectation that he (Sempronius) would be the ultimate recipient of that interest. Titius and Sempronius were both common Roman clan (gens) names, while Caius was popular both as a first name (praenōmen) and as a family/subclan name (cognōmen). Caius was probably originally Etruscan and, after the Romans introduced the distinction between the letters C and G, the name was sometimes spelled Gaius, though much as we might like to, we can’t honestly derive guy from it.

 

 

Quiet Time

Primary School (San Miguel de Allende)

On July 1, Mexico will hold a general election to determine, among other things, who will serve as the nation’s president for the next six years. Election day comes as the culmination of three months of active public campaigning on the part of the various contenders for office who from the preceding February 16 through March 29 had been legally obliged to observe  a “quiet time” known as the veda electoral, comparable to the “quiet period” US businesses are supposed to observe between the time they figure out their quarterly profit and loss and the time the results are made public. As one publication described it [http://www.cronica.com.mx/nota.php?id_nota=637175]:

 “Thursday is the start of the so-called “veda electoral,” which is the period in the middle of a campaign [el periodo intercampaña] during which the precandidates for the office of President of the Republic cannot engage in any act of  proselytizing or debate under penalty of being sanctioned…

In these 43 days of the veda, the precandidates representing the divers parties and coalitions for the nation’s highest leadership position can take part in academic forums, be interviewed by communications media, or appear on news programs.

However, the party and coalition standard-bearers will have to be very careful not to engage in any politico-electoral propaganda or call to vote.”

As mentioned in a previous viabrevis posting (“Popepourri”), the rule concerning political propaganda and vote solicitation extends to pretty much all public media, including city walls, which are accordingly scrubbed of political advertising before the veda begins:

La Veda, 2012: No Proselytizing

The word veda is from the verb vedar (‘to prohibit, impede’) from Latin vetāre ‘prohibit, forbid’ from which both Spanish and Engish get veto—no relation to English vote or  Spanish voto ‘vote,’ which come from Latin vōtum ‘a promise, pledge, vow’ from the verb vovēre ‘to make a vow.’ But because life is full of things that are too good to be true and despite common spelling errors to the contrary, Spanish votar ‘to vote’ shares no etymological connection to its homonym botar ‘to throw away, dismiss,’ ultimately from a Germanic root meaning something like ‘hit, strike’(and the basis of English butt—as in to butt heads–and button, presumably something you push through a button hole).

So, who are the players that made it through the latest veda? The presidential candidates of the three major parties are:

• Josefina Eugenia Vásquez Mota of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), the party represented by Mexico’s current president, Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa.
• Enrique Peña Nieto of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI).
• Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD).

The three are caricatured in the following cartoon that appeared in the Mexico City daily Reforma during the visit of Pope Benedict, which occurred during the veda. The speech balloon reads “¡¿And those altar boys?!”

La Veda, 2012: See and Be Seen

 Another hat in the ring (absent from the cartoon) belongs to Ricardo Gabriel Quadri de la Torre of the Partido Nueva Alianza (PANAL). More Ralph Nader than Ross Perot in both his politics and the percentage of the vote he is likely to garner come the election, Gabriel Quadri is something of a stand-out among the presidential hopefuls in that the press typically refers to him by his given name (Gabriel) plus his patronym (Quadri) without including his matronym (De la Torre), as in the daily electoral count-down published by the newspaper Milenio in which the other candidates are all identified by patronym plus matronym (a convention originally meant to show legitimacy of birth):

80 Days After the End of La Veda and Counting

To be sure, there is some variation in the names by which the media refer to the other three candidates, especially when it comes to conserving headline real estate: Andrés Manuel López Obrador is frequently referred to as AMLO while Vásquez Mota is often reduced as if by the magic of gender to her first name, Josefina. The acronym AMLO, like PAN and PANAL, has the advantage of being not only short but pronounceable. Whether the fact that amlo as a plausible word doesn’t have any semantic content beyond ‘the guy running for president on the PRD ticket’ is a plus, a minus, or of no consequence is not clear. For what it’s worth, PAN has on the plus side the fact that pan means ‘bread’—and what’s not to like about bread?—though on the minus side it also offers the potential, of which some antipanists have taken advantage in past elections, for somewhat vulgar détournement, viz: 

As for panal, while it means ‘honeycomb,’ the term can also mean ‘hornet’s nest,’ so perhaps it’s all a toss and all we can do is wait for the final tally on July 2.

And The Winner Is…

 

Words on the Bus

YOUR FAMILY IS WAITING FOR YOU

This sign appears just above the windshield inside one of  San Miguel’s many well-traveled city buses. It is a slightly edited version of the standard sign displayed on other such buses:

TU FAMILIA TE ESPERA
REPORTA AL OPERADOR
QUE HABLE POR CELULAR
ESTANDO ESTA UNIDAD
EN CIRCULACIÓN
AL TELÉFONO
1540040

[Your family is waiting for you.
Report the driver
who talks on his cell phone
while this bus is
in operation.
Call 1540040.]

As you can see, someone (quite possibly the bus driver) has edited out the second line that asks you to rat him out if you observe him talking on his cell phone while driving and has removed a generous portion of the phone number to call should you wish to do so. The injunction to not  dispose of trash [No tire basura] (“on the bus” being taken as understood) is often added to the standard message. By the way, yes, the driver could be a woman—in this context, the grammatically masculine operador could refer to a driver of either sex—but that is another subject for another day  (see the earlier viabrevis posting “Sexist Language a la Mexicana”).

 In any case, native speakers of Spanish who ride the bus probably don’t give the sign, either in its original or edited form, a passing thought. However, for those of us for whom Spanish is not a first language, the two versions of the sign are noteworthy as they provide a useful lesson in the use of the subjunctive, a feature that in the English verb system is now pretty much restricted to such linguistic mummies as Be that as it may and Till death us do part.

 In the canonical form of the sign, “Reporta al operador que hable por celular,” Reporta is the second person singular familiar (tú) imperative form of the verb reportar [‘to report’], the “you” being enjoined to do the reporting being you, the observant rider/reader. Hable here is the third person singular present subjunctive form of the verb hablar [‘to speak’]. Why the subjunctive? The point being made is subtle: The driver might actually not be speaking on his cell phone (though it certainly may look that way), so rather than accuse him flat out by using the indicative form of the verb—habla—it’s safer use the subjunctive to suggest that you’re not absolutely sure, but he seems to be talking… Spanish makes similar use of the subjunctive in referring to events that are expected to occur in the future (but might be kind of iffy): Mañana cuando venga Victor, …[‘Tomorrow (if and) when Victor comes,…’] uses the present subjunctive form venga because Victor might not in fact come after all,  rather than the more definite future form—vendrá—as in, say, Mañana vendrá mañana [‘Tomorrow will come tomorrow’].

Given the lack of punctuation and the fact that Spanish often doesn’t require an explicit subject for a verb, allowing you to infer it, the edited version of this sign can still be read  as a grammatical utterance: Instead of “Your family is waiting for you. Report the driver who looks as though he’s talking on his cell phone while the bus is in operation,” we may now read “Your family is waiting for you. Let them talk on their cell phone while the bus is in operation.” Or, perhaps less likely but still possibly: “Your family is waiting for you (tú). You (usted) are urged to talk on your cell phone while the bus is in operation.”

In both readings, hable is an instance of what is known as the hortatory subjunctive, the idea being that the subject is being exhorted to do (or not do) something. In the first case, the implicit subject of the verb would be tu familia [‘your family’] from the preceding sentence: If they’re getting impatient waiting for you to come home to dinner, let them give you a call while you’re driving the bus (perhaps on your way home even as they speak).

The other reading—admittedly a bit of a stretch—takes the second person singular “polite” form (usted) as the subject of the hortatory hable, the verb forms that regularly go with the pronoun usted being those of the third person singular. (The Cliff Notes story of usted is that Spanish appropriated an Arabic term meaning ‘experienced artisan, master,’ which could be used as an honorific, as in, “Would Master be kind enough to call his family on his cell phone?” and generalized its use as a polite form of address, retaining many of the trappings of its original grammatical third-personhood.)  The only problem—well, not the only problem—with reading Que hable por celular as “May you (you are urged to) call on your cell phone” is that in the preceding sentence (Tu familia te espera) the reader is addressed with the familiar pronouns tu and te (possessive and direct object, respectively), while here the more formal usted is the implicit addressee.

 But let’s leave it at that as this is my stop.

 

Forward and Back

DAnG|

This photograph was taken through a chain-link fence at an abandoned construction site in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. From the look of it, work had been largely completed on the exterior of this very elaborate building before the project was shut down. The purpose of the little shack in the foreground is not obvious.

The lettering on the shack, like the larger work, seems to have been abandoned in medias res: If you look up “pelig” in a Spanish-language dictionary (or avail yourself of the type-ahead feature in the Mexican edition of Google), you come up with “peligro” (‘danger’), suggesting that the mark following the “G” is an abandoned “R.” Besides “peligro,” a dictionary will typically also list “peligroso” [‘very dangerous’], while Google offers, in addition to “peligro,” “peligro reik” , “peligro reik letra” [the lyrics to the foregoing], and “peligroso pop” [a song by the pop band Plastilina Mosh], and that’s pretty much it.

So, if looking forward fills out a truncated label that would have, had it been completed, spelled “danger,” what’s the back sto|