Álvaro Vega I Córdoba, (EFE) mentality of the Spanish’ (Trifaldi).
Blasco, who does not “like foreign words” because he considers himself “a defender of the dictionary”, points out in an interview with EFE that he has captured 1,905 words in this book “with a humorous definition”, of which only a third saw the light of day for just over a year in the pages of ‘Córdoba’.
“What I try with my Vocaburlario is to do a caper with the vocabulary and find a sense of humor in the words admitted by the Academy,” he says before acknowledging that, by itself, “there are many that have it and there are others that with a A simple operation of altering a letter or a syllable achieves the same effect.
In any case, his only intention “is to make people laugh”, with a job that has taken him since the summer of 2019 when he hatched the idea with his friend and writing partner Francisco Antonio Carrasco during a family vacation in Castilla y León. .
a vital necessity
“It was going to be a two-way thing”, he says, but shortly after José Luis Blasco had “a vital need”, he was diagnosed with an endocrine tumor “and I considered Vocaburlario as a vital strategy”.
Carrasco, also a writer, was finishing his latest book of short stories and gave him permission to undertake the adventure alone on a journey that has “served as therapy” because it “has freed him mentally from the negative ideas that arise in a person when they are diagnosed with a tumor”.
By then he already writes down the first word in the notebook, ordeal. In the Vocabulary it means “continuous and prolonged intense suffering suffered by the person who loses the hair on his head.” But in a new game to promote hilarity, it comes from the words calvary / bald head.
This is the word that he has “the most affection and that I quote most frequently” of all those that have started from his “own ideas, words that come to mind reading a book or watching TV or walking around the street.” street”.
A painstaking job of exploration
He also carried out “a conscientious job” with the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, and has “reviewed from ‘a’ to ‘zeta’, all the letters, looking for precisely a game that could cause a smile”.
Although the book has closed with 1,905 words, the author has devised more than two thousand in a work that has not been heavy for him, but in which it has made him consider “self-censorship for profanity or hurtful words in a certain area, even now that You have to be very careful with gender issues.”
Among those who have self-censored, for example, there are a large number that included Trump, “who played a tremendous game and plays a tremendous game,” he points out, although “no word goes with the outburst of Trump, the former US president.”
an open task
There is also a term that caused “some discomfort” to “a faithful follower” during the stage in which the Vocarbulario was published daily, since a word in which he related the political party Vox was the only complaint that has been.
The only one on this matter that appears in the book is “voxonaro”, which defines itself as “a Spanish far-right declared an enthusiastic supporter of the Brazilian politician Jair Bolsonaro”.
The book opens with an introduction by Francisco Carrasco and a “trilogue”, which, although it is not defined in the edition, plays as if it were another word from the Vocarbulario, written by three journalists, also friends of Blasco since they met in 1977 at the Faculty of Communication Sciences of the Complutense University of Madrid, Guillermo Fesser, Juan Luis Cano, known as Gomaespuma, and Santiago Alcanda, music critic for Radio 3 (RNE). EFE