FABULAR. v. a. Hablar sin fundamento, o inventar histórias o cosas fabulosas. Latín. Fabulari. RAE (Real Academia Española)
Hablar (Spanish for to talk) comes from the Latin Del lat. Fabulāri. Another Spanish word fábula translates to fable which injects magic to the very act of talking.
To this day I can remember the voices of my father, mother and grandmother. I can also remember the voice of my Rosemary. All of them had an important qualification which made them all teachers (not my father) and this was diction. My grandmother taught me the refrains from the Don Quijote de La Mancha. She was part of my education that made me the man I am today.
Because teachers must face a roomful of students they must learn to talk, and to be understood. Any teacher can face a crowd of hundreds of people (I have) and have no fear of sudden becoming frozen in fright.
Since I am a creature from another century, I remember the first time I talked on a telephone. This was in Mexico City in 1955. We had arrived from Buenos Aires in 1953 but getting a telephone (the black ones) involved patience and bribery.
In 1959 when I was a 10 grader at St, Edward’s High School, in Austin,Texas, we had a pair of pay phones right outside the entrance to our dorm. Women and one in particular whose name has receded in my memory, knowing we were boys in a boy’s school, gave us the run-around. In those years we called such women “prick teasers”. How were we to have known that we were early recipients of phone sex?
I have written before on the difficulty in this century to converse with people on the phone.
Mr.Watson, come here, I want to see you
Only yesterday I was given these excuses after they answered the phone:
1. I can’t talk. Call another time.
2. A second person warned me that at 9PM I had woken him up. He did talk and about 10 minutes later I heard a woman in the background and was told, “This communication is over.”
Because I live alone in my Kits home with my two cats I find it important, necessary (I long for it) to converse with a human being. It helps a tad that I talk to Niño and Niña in baby Spanish. I miss being on the bed with Rosemary and discussing, our life, books, the NYTimes, the state of our daughters and granddaughters and her plans for a forthcoming trip somewhere.
Every day I wait for those two important calls from my Alexandra and Hilary. When I arrive from shopping I immediately go to the kitchen to see if anybody has left a message with my landline. This now may happen once in a long week.
I cannot understand the reluctance of people to converse. I like to use this word as it is more often used in Spanish, conversar which literally means to talk in verse.
The Spaniards in the 20th century had the tertulia. A group of men (that may have changed now) would sit at a café and drink coffee or wine and discuss politics and football. One famous gathering discussed for hours if Magellan had indeed been the first to circumnavigate the world as he had been killed in Mactán in the Philippines and his second in command, Juan Sebastian Elcano had finished the journey.
While handwriting in cursive may be a talent of our past I am seeing now that the same might happen to conversation. It has been supplanted by texting on a phone, and no matter how small your fingers, typos are a legion.
I wonder if I am in a minority? I want to talk to a sentient being.
Perhaps I should take my abuelita's advice,"A boca abierta entra la mosca." or a fly enters an open mouth.
