I slowed down today to appreciate the great weather and views (and a guaranteed spot at a private albergue in Sarria), and noticed that the signs denoting the Camino have been spelled a bit differently in Galicia. Instead of “Camino” - “Camiño.”
I learned later that the Galician dialect of Spanish sounds more Portuguese, and it prompted for me two thoughts:
I’m going to Barcelona after Santiago and will be publishing a huge post on independence in Spain, because there are so many small things I’ve noticed in these autonomous regions (Castilla y León and Galicia as two of the bigger examples).
I wonder if locals care when we say that we walk the Camino in Spain, whether we’re more specific about the autonomous regions of Spain that we walk through. Maybe a moot question but thoughts from a conversation with a local may be arriving in your inbox in the near future as I struggle to find ideas every day for this Substack.
As I considered how people in autonomous regions of Spain might react to being called “Spanish,” I knew it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to directly call someone Spanish.
But I did ponder after what point distortion of truth ought to be offensive.
By distortion of truth, I refer to framing out truthful dimensions of a concept but framing in truthful dimensions as well - so a characterization that does not paint the full picture, but isn’t technically “untrue.”
For instance, saying that someone from Galicia is Spanish might be more offensive than saying someone from Madrid is Spanish, because Galicia is an autonomous region of Spain that has declared independence before, and Madrid is Spain’s capital.
But both are technically true - the former misses some important nuance and is maybe(?) not appropriate to say.
I met someone around a week ago who mentioned that he grew up in Kurdistan, which right now is divided between four countries in the Middle East - Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Calling him Turkish would be inappropriate as a distortion of truth - true by externally drawn border but not by culture or national affiliation or ancestry.
There’s a lot more I want to mention about the politics of recognition and independence, but I’ll save that for when I have my laptop.
I’ve also noticed multiple times while in Europe that people will sometimes mock others in arguments. When people mock they make a caricature of someone’s voice, perhaps focusing exclusively on one feature of their voice, to comedic or malicious effect. My gut tells me this is offensive but when does mocking become a really good imitation, and vice versa?
Ok, even more general than “is distortion of truth offensive” - does it still even count as truth?
During the Spring I had dinner across from Bill Adair, the founder of Politifact. Politifact is a leading fact checker of politics. I’ll voice what I wanted to ask him (unfortunately didn’t get the chance) here, and maybe will follow up on this when I (hopefully) get to talk to him at Duke sometime in the Fall.
Usually Politifact won’t designate something as false is it’s just misleading, or in other words is just a distortion of the truth. Here’s a hypothetical example: let’s say that A is 1% of the cause for B, and someone says that A causes B - this is technically not false but extremely misleading. Or as I can tell, according to Politifact.
Another longer post coming at you when I have my laptop, when I can actually back these claims systemically and not just anecdotally.
But I’m not sure we should grant truth so easily. I fear that when we allow truth to be diluted and we take derivative after derivative after derivative, we’re left with . . . something unrecognizable from the original. It might actually be an insult to truths to live in the same vocabulary family as these distortions - or to make a proactive argument, maybe distortions of truths should just be called falsehoods.
But where is this line drawn? In the above example, 5%? 15%? And who decides?
I have to say, catching the tilde on the n in “Camino” had me in a great mood the rest of the day. This graffiti helped too: