There is a species of human being who cannot hear a familiar expression without feeling an irresistible urge to correct it.
—In the end, the restaurant became famous through boca a boca—literally, “mouth to mouth.”
—Well… actually, it’s boca a oreja—“mouth to ear.”
Thank you.
Thank goodness.
A whole lifetime speaking Spanish, and nobody had ever explained to us that we hear through our ears.
The problem with some modern corrections is not that they offer an alternative. Language is full of alternatives, and that is usually a source of richness. The problem begins when someone discovers a new, more sophisticated or simply different form and retrospectively decides that the one we have used all our lives was wrong.
And something particularly amusing happens with boca a oreja: the correction claims to be more logical than the expression it corrects.
The reasoning appears flawless. If one person speaks and another listens, the message leaves the first person’s mouth and reaches the second person’s ear. It should therefore be “mouth to ear,” not “mouth to mouth.”
Up to that point, nothing especially absurd.
Except that boca a boca was never intended as an anatomical description of the auditory process.
The expression describes a chain of transmission.
One person tells someone something. The next person tells someone else. The next repeats it again. One mouth passes on a piece of information that later emerges from another mouth, then passes to another, and so on.
From mouth to mouth.
It is difficult to imagine a simpler representation of the phenomenon.
“Boca a oreja,” by contrast, describes a single stage quite well: I speak and you listen. And this is not merely a semantic fancy. FundéuRAE, which considers both Spanish expressions valid, explains precisely that boca a boca conveys the idea of a continuous flow in which each person passes information to another, who then passes it on again, whereas boca a oreja emphasises the communicative act between the person speaking and the person listening.
In other words, we can say boca a oreja.
Perfectly well.
What is considerably harder to justify is putting on an imaginary pair of linguist’s glasses, raising one eyebrow slightly and correcting someone who has said boca a boca.
Because they were not wrong.
In fact, if the aim is to explain how a rumour, a recommendation or a restaurant’s reputation spreads, boca a boca makes magnificent sense.
Mouth.
Mouth.
Mouth.
Mouth.
Each one represents another person who has received the information and passes it on again.
If we apply to expressions the same literalism with which some people try to correct them, “mouth to ear” has a small problem.
Mouth → ear.
End.
The information has reached the second person beautifully. Congratulations. But that is where our sophisticated propagation system comes to an end.
To keep it going, we would have to call it:
Mouth → ear → mouth → ear → mouth → ear → mouth.
Although even that would not be sufficiently precise.
Because the ear does not pick up a sentence and hand it directly to the mouth like someone passing a file across an office. Quite a few things happen in between. The sound must reach the auditory system, be converted into nerve signals and processed by the brain. Then, if the person decides to pass on what they have just heard, they must formulate their own response and use their vocal apparatus to produce new sounds.
So we can make the expression even better.
“Mouth to ear to auditory system to brain to vocal apparatus to mouth to ear.”
Much more precise.
And completely idiotic.
Because expressions do not work that way.
When Spanish speakers say that a piece of news “runs like gunpowder,” nobody interrupts to explain that news has no legs and that gunpowder does not run either. When someone “throws the house out of the window,” we trust that they have not hired a crane. If we say that someone has “turned to stone,” we do not call the Geological and Mining Institute.
Language works because we are capable of abstraction.
We understand an idea without demanding that every individual word physically describe every process taking place in reality.
That is why this contemporary form of linguistic pedantry is so fascinating: it consists of dismantling a perfectly understandable expression, identifying a supposed literal inaccuracy and rebuilding it so that it appears more logical.
The procedure also provides a small psychological reward.
For a few seconds, one person knows something the other apparently does not.
—It isn’t boca a boca. It’s boca a oreja.
It does not matter very much that the first expression is traditional, more widely used and entirely valid. FundéuRAE specifically considers it the preferable form when referring to oral transmission, while also accepting boca a oreja.
What matters is having corrected someone.
Some corrections improve language. In Spanish, confusing infligir—“to inflict”—with infringir—“to infringe”—can change the meaning of a sentence. A misplaced comma can create ambiguity. Using a word while believing that it means the exact opposite of its true meaning is a good reason for someone to alert us.
Correction can be useful.
But there is another kind of correction whose principal product is not clarity.
It is the corrector.
Its purpose is to place on record that the corrector knows an expression they regard as more precise, more modern or more elegant than yours.
And perhaps that is where we find one of our minor contemporary absurdities: believing that every linguistic innovation is necessarily an improvement and that knowing it entitles us to work backwards, correcting everything that was already functioning perfectly well.
Because language changes. Naturally.
Words appear, others disappear, expressions alter their meaning, and some variants eventually displace earlier ones. Nothing especially worrying about that. Trying to freeze a language is probably as absurd as trying to prevent cities, music or fashions from changing.
But allowing a language to evolve is one thing. Requiring every novelty to invent a previous error in order to justify its own existence is quite another.
Boca a oreja can coexist peacefully with boca a boca.
There is no need to declare a winner.
If someone wants to say that a campaign succeeds thanks to boca a oreja, they are welcome to do so. The meaning is perfectly clear, and the expression is accepted. If someone else says that a book has sold through boca a boca, they are also speaking correctly. And if a third person says that the news travelled de boca en boca—“from mouth to mouth”—they do not need to be rescued from their ignorance either: that expression is equally valid for describing the spread of information.
The absurdity begins the moment someone hears one of those expressions and feels obliged to say:
—No, no. You say boca a oreja.
No.
You can say it that way too.
Which is quite different.
And if we are going to choose which expression better represents a chain of people passing on information, I still feel a certain affection for that old, imperfect and supposedly outdated phrase in which one mouth symbolically receives the baton from another and then hands it to the next.
Because my ears allow me to hear what you tell me.
But it is my mouth that keeps the story going.
So you can call it boca a oreja.
You can call it boca a boca.
You can say that something travels de boca en boca.
The only truly unnecessary thing is using the conversation to demonstrate to the person in front of you that you know how they ought to speak.
Especially when you have just corrected an expression that was already correct.
That really does spread with extraordinary ease.
From pedant to pedant.
