Inspired by a much better post, I write about how my mind went too off-topic for my own good
I was reading a wonderful blogpost by Marisabel about bringing back the prose. It is a nice article that you should probably read over whatever this post ends up becoming after I’m done typing it.
The point is, the first line mentions a term I hadn’t heard before: circumlocution. Just by reading it, I thought it was pretty self-explanatory, it sounded like going back in circles or something alike.
It is defined as “the use of an unnecessarily large number of words to express an idea” and I thought it was quite a nice word. I read the rest of the post and whole-heartedly agree that writing in a more verbose way to express thoughts in a deeper manner, even if it may not be digestable by just skimming at it once, can be very good and also add some nice color to the text.
Honestly, if Hothouse or Childhood’s End were written like people talk today, I don’t think I would have finished them!
My mind however, wandered in the direction of a different term of Mexican origin known as “Cantinflear”, this is a term coined after Cantinflas, a Mexican actor who starred in lots of comedy films from the 30s to the 80s. One of his most characteristic traits was his tendency to, basically, talk gibberish, entangle, jumble, muddle and beat around the bush for whatever topic he was asked about. I guess you could say it’s like circumlocution, but without the “expressing an idea” part. The proper definition translated from the Diccionario de la Lengua Española is “to talk or act in an absurd and inconsistent manner, saying nothing substantial.”
So, for an example, if we are talking about blogging, which is like, the act of writing for a blog, I mean, the blog you are reading at the moment, or maybe you are not reading it really but, you could be skimming through it, or through this very article in this moment, when everyone around you is on their phones, or computers if you are at work, and I wonder why are you reading this at work? is it boring or is this more entertaining? I guess blogging is entertaining and reading blogposts is too, but we are talking about blogging, not reading, after all why not just read books? Books were blogs in written form or maybe it’s better to refer to blogs before the web existed as journals, but not every blog is a journal, and journals exist today despite blogs being a thing too, such as this one, although I am not talking about what’s going on with my day right now, just the act of blogging in general.
And that, is what us Mexicans like to call, a cantinfleada.
I don’t know if cantinflear works that well in written form. There’s some compilations on YouTube, but since they are in Spanish, a lot of the people reading this maybe even more confused. Still, the delivery and the context of those moments is important for the comedy to work. I still get a chuckle out of those movies, but I kind of feel like many Spanish speakers in younger generations struggle to make any sense out of them. After all, they really are senseless and go nowhere, but there’s still a term to refer to them.
Maybe the same is true with a lot of modern writing. If I can just easily understand everything in a sentence it is also very common for me to just forget it, it may flow in the moment but just as it’s read, it’s forgotten.
