Welcome to Barsof

You may know that the word polaco (Pole, Polish) is used in a derogatory way by people from elsewhere in Spain, in particular Madrid, to refer to a Catalan. Hence the title of the very popular TV3 satire programme Pol?nia. The thinking seems to have been: so they call us polacos? Okay: then this crazy place is Pol?nia.

No one seems to know how this usage originated. The standard explanation is that Catalan sounds nasty and foreign and incomprehensible. But why Polish? Why not Russian, or Arabic, or Swedish? You know the origin of the word barbarian? Barbaros was the Greek word for a foreigner, a person who didn't speak Greek but just this bar-bar-bar noise. Similarly, Catalans have sometimes been referred to as barking dogs. There was quite an uproar a few years ago when someone noticed that the new Collins Spanish-English dictionary did not specify that ?polaco' was derogatory, but just ?familiar'. I'm just back from Warsaw where one son is studying, and the other son's Polish girlfriend is staying with us in Bcn, and I think Polish sounds great. In fact it does have some phonological similarities to Catalan - like the xiuxiueig - pronounced shiushiuwedge - which means whispering. Polish has a large number of such sibilant, whispering sounds. And then there are the ?l' sounds pronounced with the hump of the tongue way back in the mouth. In Polish, the ?l' is pronounced so far back it has turned into a ?w'. And when you say ?quins pebrots!' (what peppers, aka balls, aka what a cheek/what chutzpah), it certainly has a Polish (or Russian) ring. Talking of language mangling, in our family we don't call it Warsaw or Vars?via now. On my Clickair flight, the pilot's English was virtually incomprehensible. As we plunged through the clouds, he announced we would shortly be landing at the airoport (sic) of Barsof. We fell around laughing for days, and now the city on the Wistula is forever Barsof.