Tag: slang

I was presented with a pun the other day and I totally failed to get it. It was in the context of one of those puzzles where you have to work out how to resolve an apparent contradiction: there are two parents and two children in the car but there are only three people. How is that possible? The answer is that it’s three generations: grandpa, dad, son, where the dad is also the son of the grandpa. One of the guesses was along the lines of maybe it’s a gay couple, and when they realised it couldn’t be that because even in Ron DeSantis’s Florida, homosexuals don’t count as only half a person, they said “Estou muito pouco esperta”.

So where’s the pun? In English, we might say someone who immediately tried to introduce an LGBT theme into an unrelated discussion is “Woke”, but someone who gets riddles straight away might be “Clever”. Actually, let’s say “smart” – I don’t know why, but I feel this american, practical sort of cleverness is the best one to use in this context, because both “Woke” and “Smart” can be translated as “esperto”. So the person was saying that they’d got the joke wrong by being “not so smart” but also saying they weren’t one of these woke people.

I marked it down as something to look into and I have because I’m a nerd. As far as I can tell from the canonical meaning of esperto on priberam and the more slangy definition on dicionário informal, esperto doesn’t mean the same as “Woke” as its used in English now: meaning the person holds a range of well-manicured opinions related to identity politics that are simultaneously censorious, emphasising and exacerbating social division as much as possible and also weirdly corporate-friendly and able to be used in a LinkedIn post without the slightest trace of irony. No, rather, esperto is more literally “awake”. It’s related to the word “despertador” (alarm clock) so it goes back to the original meaning of woke – that you’re awake, that you’ve had your eyes opened to injustice.

So it works as a pun, but don’t get carried aeay: I don’t think you could say of an earnest and slightly preachy young person that they were “esperto”. Woke is apparently used in portuguese. I doubt the cultural salience is exactly equal (people my age using it in a “tut tut, what is the world coming to” way, and people under thirty acting as though trying to destroy other people’s lives over a tweet was “just being kind”), but it does exist. Here, for example, at 4:20, where you can see other Americanisms like “boomer”, and “policamente correto”

So what about the other meaning of esperto? Why did I say smart was a better translation than clever? Or, put another way, what’s the difference between being inteligente and being esperto? The Açoriano podcast Helfimed explains it in this video using an analogy, starting at 3.38

He says, in his amazing accent, that if you imagine 2 people who have never seen electric light, and they’re put in a room and then the lights are turned off. They both see there’s a light switch on the wall (how they see this in the dark, we’re not told) and they can see it’s something unfamiliar. The inteligente is thinking well, maybe it controls the light, but maybe it’s a trap. And if it does turn on the lights, how does that work? They’re seeing the problem in a more holistic way, maybe. The esperto, on the other hand, is more practical, operating at the level of cause and effect, and so he just cracks on, finds out what works, and gets results.

So that’s that. I think I’ve done a thorough job of over-analysing the hell out of that, haven’t I.