Tag Archives: tú and usted

Bad Spanish?? — high culture edition

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Most of my “Bad Spanish” posts pick on the creators of road signs, shopping cart signs, and commercial packaging — folks whom you wouldn’t necessarily expect to be that adept at Spanish. In this post the “Bad Spanish” culprits should definitely know better. They are the folks in Madrid who sell tickets online for the Teatro de la Comedia, the city’s highbrow venue for classical Spanish theater.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I recently took advantage of a stopover in Madrid on my way home from Andalucía to attend a performance of El burlador de Sevilla, Tirso de Molina’s original (17th century) version of the Don Juan legend. I bought the tickets ahead of time and received them as an email attachment, shown below. As you can see, the ticket states Esta es tu entrada, using the familiar (tu) possessive pronoun, but then presente esta hoja ‘show this page’ using the formal (usted) command form of the verb presentar. Bad Spanish IMHO!

HOWEVER…this tú/usted switch is reminiscent of one I saw in a NYC subway car and blogged about a few months ago, a post that provoked many comments, including two from readers OK with the switch. So to be fair, perhaps it isn’t actually a problem here, and my “Bad Spanish” moniker is perhaps too harsh.

I did contact the ticket-selling agency to ask if the combination of modalities was accidental or deliberate, and received a most courteous and thoughtful reply, which I translate below.

From the perspective of our office (technical support for ticket sales) we don’t know exactly why this document uses the two different treatments. We’ll consult with the National Institute of Dramatic and Musical Arts to see if there exists a memorandum we can make use of that explains not only the types of texts and their distribution in the document, but also an explanation of the intentions of each text.

Personally, the second text (presente) seems more correct to me. It is a request made to the person who has bought the ticket, and it seems to be a basic norm of courtesy to address this person using the usted form. Perhaps in the first text they were aiming for a more impactful message and for this reason chose a different treatment.

From an anecdotal perspective, the use of tú and usted is a frequent topic of debate in [Spanish] marketing departments. The use of usted is positively associated with good manners and respect but also with a distance to the client, for which reason it’s common to make use of tú in order to attain greater closeness or empathy at the sacrifice of courtesy. In our own www.entradasinaem.es website you can see that we’ve used [informal] suscríbete and únete al inaem, thus linking the informal grammatical treatment with the idea of connecting with our institution.

As a penultimate note, please note the ticket price: 25 euros for sixth-row orchestra seats. ¡Qué ganga! And as a final note, El burlador ROCKED!!! So I got a great night out of it as well as a blog post. 🙂

Tú and usted in the Spanish Civil War

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I just finished reading Spain in our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. This is the second book I’ve read by Adam Hochschild; the first is King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. I strongly recommend both of them. Spain in our Hearts masterfully blends a military history of the Spanish Civil War with the personal stories of Americans who were involved in the war as soldiers, medics, writers, and advocates. The main focus is on Americans who supported the Republican (anti-Franco) cause, but a handful on the other side are profiled as well. Hochschild also describes how internal political conflicts in the United States, Soviet Russia, and other countries shaped their role in the war.

In addition to its historical insights, Spain in our Hearts includes an interesting linguistic anecdote, about the use of the informal tú versus formal usted (both meaning ‘you’). An ambulance driver en route to a field hospital, realizing that he might have chosen the wrong road, hailed a group of men “sitting by a fire 200 yards away, whose uniforms he could not see in the dark. When the answer came back, ‘¿Qué quieres tú?‘ he relaxed, knowing they were Republicans. ‘If I had been answered ‘Usted‘ instead of ‘Tú,’ I should have been speaking to fascists.” This anecdote especially intrigues me because it contradicts the claim, in an essay by the Spanish sociologist and language commentator Amando de Miguel, that the widespread use of tú in Spain began as “una ilusión igualitarista que se impuso en la última guerra civil, en los dos bandos“, i.e. on both sides in the war. I’d be happy to hear from readers who might know something about this question. Was tú a sign of a Republican, or was its use more widespread?

Spain in our Hearts came into my hands at just the right moment. As a relatively new book with rave reviews, it is in heavy demand at my local library. I added my name to my library’s wait list months ago. By the time I got to the top of the list, and was able to check out the book, my interest in the Spanish Civil War had been primed by a bundle of other factors. I had read El tiempo entre costuras, which takes place during the war, and in the early years of Franco’s regime, and three books from Jordi Sierra i Fabra’s Inspector Mascarell series), which take place just before and after Franco’s conquest of Barcelona. (My blog posts referring to these books can be found here and here.) On my recent trip to Spain I spent time in Burgos, which served as Franco’s headquarters during the war, and in Madrid and Barcelona, two cities that were besieged. Seeing the turnoff for Teruel on the road from Burgos to Girona reminded me of how little I knew about the crucial battle there — the site of the tú/usted anecdote, incidentally. Now that I’ve read the book, I’ll have to go back to Spain yet again, and see these places through fresh eyes. I might even try a commercial Civil War tour of Barcelona, Madrid, or battlefields.