The genius of language versus spelling and grammatical errors

On December 8th, subscriber Andreu Suriol sent me a brief, ironic email: "Is Korea resuming 'exports' (and we'll be fed Korean pigs) or 'imports' (and they'll eat ours)?" Dr. Carola Duran Tort, a philologist, member of the Verdaguer Society, and author of an interesting bibliography on 19th-century Catalan literature and Catalanism, wrote to me the same day about the topic and explained her reasoning:

"A subscriber since the first issue, one of the first things I do in the morning is read the newspaper, which I only skimmed the night before on my phone. That's why it pains me that, sometimes, language seems to have lost its genius. I waited this morning to make sure that last night's headline in 'Christ was Pope Marina' was the same as the one in this edition. It's titled 'Korea resumes pork exports.'"

"A careful reading," he continues, "has confirmed to me that Korea won't be flooding us with pork, like with cars, but rather that Catalonia is once again selling it to the Asian country. It would have been as easy as running headlines like: 'Catalonia resumes exports…' or 'Korea imports again…', making it clear who the seller is."

"Something similar happens to me when, in sports reports, it is written that 'team X has won away from home,' referring to the fact that team X has won on the opposing team's field. A misuse of language that perverts its meaning."

In another email, he shares a beautiful reflection on what he calls "the genius of language," a concept he has developed throughout his academic and essayistic research, viewing language as an expression of the soul of a people and their collective identity. He has also worked on journalism: in one of his emails, he asks me "how events that have filled pages and commentaries disappear from the news media, overtaken by more recent events, leaving no trace," like the wild boars that have brought us together.

Carola Duran writes: "More than my philological knowledge, which is there, it is the sound of the language that shows me whether the constructions flow or are forced. In times of censorship, I had not heard any other language than Catalan because on both my mother's and father's side everyone was from here. And in a time when antibiotics were unknown, I spent two winters in Catalonia reading books that I probably didn't understand very well, but that must have given me that inner feeling of genius."

The head of Language and head of the proofreading team, Pau Domènech, considers Carola Duran's comments "interesting and relevant," and argues:

"Regarding the first comment, nothing to add: it's absolutely right. Errors like this, not strictly linguistic but also affecting the content, sometimes slip through and go unnoticed for whatever reason, and end up being thorns in our side. In this case, because we didn't catch it in time, we ended up saying practically the opposite: 'I found it.' He corrected it immediately, the day after publishing the piece, but it was already too late for the paper."

"Regarding the second comment, I have to disagree (it's healthy!). It's true that in sports journalism, very local phraseology is often used, we could say; expressions that become established in sports language and don't leave it, or that even leave the world of sports and enter the common world, which are such expressive expressions (as someone said) to make the text understandable for any reader at any time.

"Here, however, we have an expression that we also find outside the field of sports, and with the same meaning:

"2[LC]at home loc. adv.At the address of the interested party.Home service. A doctor who makes house calls. Serving, selling, delivering goods to your home.

“Doing a search,” Domènech concludes, “I found discussions about this same expression in French, so it’s not surprising that it generates some confusion (I understand why), but dictionaries make it clear. The point here, in my opinion, is not to overuse certain turns of phrase that can easily become mannerisms: one can opt for ‘away victory’ and, as our subscriber suggests, ‘victory on opposing turf,’ among others. Variety enriches language.”

A few days after the pig-related back-and-forth, subscriber David Cester Vidal sent me a general comment about the errors: "Lately, I'm finding too many spelling and grammatical errors in the newspaper's edition. I think this falls short of the standard expected of the language; I believe one must be exemplary in its use. As an example, here's a sample from today ["Nick Reiner's struggle with drugs left his parents desperate," December 17]. Luckily, they corrected another one in time that referred to the "woman judge" instead of the correct one."

The complaints and suggestions I receive from readers about the language are frequent, and consequently I transform into Scarlett O'Hara and, on the Bauhaus scale of the ARA, "I swear to God I will speak of language again," because if language makes a country, language makes a daily life. We Catalans have a permanent feeling of instability in a language that has lived under ancestral pressure, with special mention of Francoism which it rekindles; I refer to the canonical texts of Josep Benet (The Francoist attempt at cultural genocide against Catalonia), Francesc Ferrer and Gironès (The political persecution of the Catalan language) and Josep M. Solé i Sabater and Joan Villarroya (Chronology of the repression of the Catalan language and culture under Francoism).

Before the wind blows away the oath on the stairs, I note that Google Gemini's AI gives us a very good rating: "the ARA newspaper is characterized by its high, curated, and benchmark level of Catalan," with a "very strong proofreading team" and contributions that use a cultivated and literary register. It values ​​Albert Pla Nualart's significant role in shaping the language and notes that "the newspaper follows a model of formal standard Catalan, but with a desire to be approachable and modern. It is neither archaic nor excessively academic, but rather seeks a balance between grammatical correctness and the naturalness of contemporary journalism." It highlights the attention to vocabulary and that "they were among the first media outlets to decisively adopt the 2016 spelling reform of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans (IEC) (such as the reduction of diacritical marks)." It notes that it receives many inquiries about ARA and recommends it to students as an aid to "expand their vocabulary and solidify correct grammatical structures."

The Ombudsman's conclusion, corroborated by various sources, is twofold: the Catalan of the ARA has become the standard and, in order to neutralize the "fairies"/printer's brochures – a euphemism for the errors that still slip through when an article has gone through section reviews and linguistic correction – it would be advisable to establish a final reading with a magnifying glass of the texts before publishing them with the posthumous errors, as I already pointed out in the chronicle "Sisyphus and the enigma of the tape recorder editor"Published on the 4th of last month. It ends in da capo grateful for the privilege of being able to establish this chronicle based on the emails of Dr. Duran Tort.

The Reader's Advocate pays attention to doubts, suggestions, criticisms, and complaints about the newspaper's content in its digital and print editions, and ensures that the handling of information is in accordance with the codes of ethics.

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