It is a small, half-crooked hairline, and even so, a simple tilde has been able to arouse expectation and acrimonious debates as if it were a flag. Maybe it is. Or maybe it’s just a question of ‘salseo’.
For days one of the most illustrious academics of the Royal Spanish Academy, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, go to a fight with the institution itself, or rather, with whoever runs itSantiago Muñoz Machado, with the tilde of ‘only’ involved.
It was all news that after 13 years the RAE will rectify and allow that word to be accentuated again when there is room for doubt about its meaning, something that some defenders of that disputed tilde celebrated, including Pérez-Reverte.
So when the RAE wrote on Twitter that “what was approved in the plenary session of March 2 does not modify the doctrine of ‘Spelling’ of 2010. He even expresses it more clearly: The obligation not to check the adverb “only” and the demonstrative pronouns when there is no risk of ambiguity is maintained “, the Alatriste writer jumped.
“‘Nothing new is added’? ‘Will you have to justify it’? I’m sorry to say that @RAEinforma, led by an anti-tildista academic, you are giving biased and inaccurate information. Yesterday, the plenary session of the RAE approved an important modification. The plenary session next Thursday will be stormy“, he also wrote on the social network of the little blue bird.
Pérez-Reverte, with the sarcasm and sarcasm that he usually shows off, went even further and after writing a tweet for 8M that included a “only”, he assured that writing it like that had been “a little personal wickedness on Sicilian eves”. It should be remembered that the Sicilian vespers are known as the event for which, after ringing the bells of the vespers service in Palermo, the population started a revolt during which the French garrison was massacred who was in town. Of course, the writer later took away iron: “Don’t take that phrase too seriously.“, he added.
This Thursday that plenary session of the RAE has been held and after him, an unusual press conference, for not ordinary, in which the president of the RAE Santiago Muñoz Machado clarified what had happened in plenary: the previous minutes, with the modification of the wording of the norm, has been unanimously approved.
“Fortunately he has not given more than himself, I come without any dressing”, he joked. “We have had a plenary session in which those who have wanted to intervene have spoken with the force they wanted, but in courteous terms as usual. We have reached a peaceful solution, to everyone’s liking and it has been a great plenary session”he assured.
According to the director of the RAE, after this plenary session “nobody has given their arm to twist, because the grammarians have accepted and the writers too, that this paragraph is enough to satisfy their claims, so no one has felt harmed. There have been no winners or losers“, he assured, about the addition in the standard that leaves it up to the writer to consider whether or not there is ambiguity when using ‘only’.
“On the writers’ side, Arturo Pérez-Reverte has been one of the most active and has caused a document to be recorded in the minutes that made its position clearer“Said the director, omitting to give more details, taking advantage of the fact that the deliberations of the plenary session are not public.
About the atmosphere in the Academy, he assured that “we get along very well and share work very normally“.
