Calibri: not so woke after all

One reason for maintaining my blog is that it keeps me in touch with friends in many different places, who often know more about a topic than I do. Toby Bainton wrote the following to me about the question of the Calibri and Times New Roman typefaces prompted by Secretary Marco Rubio’s designation of Times New Roman as the official typeface of the State Department, suggesting that the adoption of Calibri had been a wasteful DEIA initiative of the Biden administration:

 

I have a strictly amateur interest in typography. Stanley Morison designed Times New Roman fulfilling a commission from The Times, which wanted, not surprisingly, a type which is legible in newspaper columns at very small sizes. The design is brilliant for that purpose. It is also very good as a normal-sized type for letterpress work, and was for many years the standard type used by HMSO.  It is pretty useless as a display face, for example in very large sizes, such as on the side of an aircraft. In those instances it looks bland and lacking in style. That's because it was designed for a quite different purpose.

Sans serif faces are nowadays generally preferred for reading on a computer screen. This has less to do with the serifs themselves than with the gradations of width in the appearance of letters with serifs. You only need to take a look at a lower case e in Times New Roman to see that it has marked variations in the thickness of the letter-form across its curves. This helps legibility on the page but causes problems once computers come in.

In computer-based work, typefaces are routinely blown up or shrunk down optically. If you do this with a thick-and-thin serif type, you get less legible results than with the more uniform cross-section of sans serif type. This is because when you enlarge or shrink something optically, the height and breadth of the letter may be (for example) doubled or halved, but if you double or halve the x-height, the *area* of shading on the thick-and-thin strokes then increases or decreases by a factor of four. This is simple arithmetic but it makes a crucial difference to the appearance of the letter.

Personally my ideal when reading is a serif type in good crisp letterpress. Very rare these days. Sans serif types are generally best as display faces (for example, the ubiquitous Gill Sans is fantastically successful as a display face but quite tiring to read in small sizes as a text face). But sans serif faces have their value in text on the screen for mathematical reasons. You can get away more easily with optical re-sizing, with less apparent distortion to the letter form.

 

So my conclusion regarding Times New Roman versus Calibri is that in the computer-based text age, Calibri is (unfortunately) better for everyone, whether visually-impaired or not. This has nothing to do with wokery – you just have to do the math.   

Oh woke is me?

 

Typography does not often make headlines, but shortly before Christmas, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, unwittingly reminded me a good friend from my publishing past. Richard Garnett was the son of David (“Bunny”) Garnett, a novelist, publisher and member of the Bloomsbury Group. Richard was born into this set of bohemian, in some cases bisexual, writers and artists. He recalled playing in the garden with Virginia Woolf.

 

I first met Richard when he was the editorial director of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (a new version of a classic and much-revered reference work). We later worked together on The Dictionary of Art (published in 1996), the largest art history publishing venture of the 20^th century. Richard was a fine editor, author and typographer. 

 

Cover of Richard's Jack of Dover

 

When Mr. Rubio reminded me of Richard, I hunted on my bookshelf for a book, Jack of Dover, published in 1966 by Rupert-Hart Davis, that he had given me many years ago. Richard had written it for his son, Oliver, then ten years old. My copy is inscribed “For Christopher [my eldest son, then aged four] in due course from Richard Garnett Christmas 1987.” I can’t tell you what the typeface is, but it is set throughout in a readable serif typeface (serif type has, my dictionary says, “a slight projection finishing off a stroke of a letter”). I don’t know whether Richard chose the typeface, but it is likely that he did, since he worked for Hart-Davis. Illustrations are by Graham Oakley, a name familiar to all my sons since I read Oakley’s witty and engaging (for child and adult) Church Mice books, published by Macmillan, to them at bedtime many times.

A spread from Jack of Dover.

I must confess that typography is a publishing skill that was not my forte, but I recall Richard lamenting declining standards of typography in an age of computer typesetting. On the other hand, when I worked at Thames & Hudson, typography and overall design, for readability, elegance and appropriateness were the subject of considerable attention and discussion.

 

It was in connection with typography that Mr. Rubio reminded me of Richard. Shortly before Christmas Mr Rubio changed the State Department’s official typeface to Times New Roman from Calibri. Times New Roman had been the official typeface previously, but was changed to Calibri by Mr. Rubio’s predecessor Anthony Blinken, on the grounds that Calibri is more accessible to readers who are visually impaired and generally more accessible in a digital age. Calibri is a san-serif typeface and is the default used in Microsoft Windows. According to its designer, who was interviewed BBC Radio 4, Calibri was designed to be easily read on screen and to cause few errors when using text-to-speech and optical character recognition tools.

 

Media coverage of the decision quoted Mr. Rubio as saying that Times New Roman conveys an appropriate clarity and formality in State Department communications, but also characterized the change as ending a wasteful DEIA (diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility) initiative. I found this emphasis on DEIA questionable, possibly silly.

 

However, full text of Mr. Rubio’s reasoning is at a site called Daring Fireball:

https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/full_text_of_marco_rubio_state_dept_directive_times_new_roman. The author of this site criticizes the coverage of the decision in the New York Times for distorting Mr, Rubio’s reasoning by placing undue emphasis on his reference to DEIA.

 

Now, it is true that the statement that justifies the decision is lengthy and reasoned. Mr. Rubio observes that the Foreign Affairs Handbook states that a serif typeface is “appropriate to the Department’s dignity and position as a senior cabinet-level department.” Further, he argues that serif typefaces originate from Roman antiquity, and that other government bodies use a serif typeface, for example the White House, the Supreme Court. Furthermore, President John F. Kennedy chose a serif typeface for the words “United States of America” on the fuselage of Air Force One.

 

Mr. Rubio, further justifies restoring the use of a serif font by noting that “the number of accessibility-based document remediation cases at the Department of State was the same in the year after adopting Calibri as in the year before (1,192 cases in FY2024 versus 1,193 cases in FY2022).” And that “the costs of remediation actually increased by $145,000 in that period – nearly a 20% jump.” Technical remediation refers to work required to ensure that files are compatible with assistive technologies such as screen readers. It is worth noting that the annual budget of the State Department is $58.8 billion, so a $145,000 does not constitute large scale waste. It should also be noted that such cases are one very narrow measure of accessibility; there may well have been instances of visually impaired people finding documents in Calibri easy to read and not reporting their experience to the State Department for the simple reason that there was nothing to report, no remediation, only success that involved no cost or labour. Moreover, those who benefit from accessibility include not just the visually impaired who use assistive technology, but, for example, dyslexic people who require simple, readable type: as the father of a dyslexic son I am especially aware of their requirements. So Mr. Rubio’s case may not be proved at all.

 

I wondered whether Mr. Rubio’s assertion that the adoption of a san serif typeface was inherently wasteful, really stands up to scrutiny. General Services Administration Services Administration guidelines state that “For people with good vision, a typeface with serifs is slightly easier and faster to read than one without serifs. Typically, for people with low vision, the serifs significantly degrade legibility. The importance of using a sans serif typeface is especially important for digital content since it is typically read on-screen and not in hardcopy print.” The GSA further states that other factors, such as colour, contrast, the ability to resize text, reflow and text spacing contribute to readability (think dyslexics here). The accessibility guidelines of the Royal National Institute for the Blind in the UK recommend the use of san serif. However, some brief browsing online led me to studies and opinion pieces that suggest that serif typeface may not be inherently less accessible than san serif, and that other design factors affect readability. It seems that that matter is not settled, but one hopes that Mr Rubio considered the people behind his decision, rather than the politics.

 

Just before Christmas I read the obituary of a typographer, John Morgan, who designed the books of Common Worship of the Anglican church. Morgan introduced an elegant, appealing design with plenty of white space and Gill Sans type, chosen for its fresh and clear appearance. The design was also intended to be easy to read, including by visually impaired worshipers. His obituary noted that the books are often used in dimply lit churches, so ease of reading was key for all worshipers.

 

Thames & Hudson, where I worked for the last thirteen years of my publishing life, pays particular attention to typeface. The criteria for selecting types include clarity, accessibility, elegance and appropriateness. DEIA was never discussed. In the books I published, serif type was used for the main body of the text, but good san serif typefaces were selected (often but not always) for elements such as headings, captions, special features, and the like to distinguish them typographically from the main text. The interests of the reader were always the criterion for the use of typefaces.

 

I also noted that the UK Foreign Office’s official typefaces for both print and online use are san serif. The type selected for print use is Helvetica Neue, which is said to reflect heritage and modernity.

 

My own view on this minor typographical controversy, is that Mr. Rubio’s decision is not entirely unreasoned. However, his remark that “although switching to Calibri was not among the Department’s most illegal, immoral, radical, or wasteful instances of DEIA [under the previous administration] … it was nonetheless cosmetic” is not proved by the evidence he provided. Moreover, his remark reveals a predisposition to consider efforts to improve accessibility wasteful, especially if implemented by the previous administration. In short accessibility is inherently suspicious, if not bad, and especially if it was the work of the Biden administration.

 

I am left wondering what Richard Garnett would have said about the matter. Whatever he might have decided, his judgement would have been wise and well informed. I wonder if that is true of Mr. Rubio.

Building a 7th-century Anglo-Saxon ship in Suffolk

 

Shortly before Christmas we met my youngest brother Tim and Dave his lurcher dog in Melton where, in the late 19^th-century, my great grandfather Charles Jacobs preached in the Methodist chapel. We walked along the banks of the river Deben. It was a beautiful sunny day. A meandering line of ancient wooden stakes guided the eye across the mud, where the odd bird was seeking its lunch. Nobody can be quite sure what the function of the old wooden structures might have been. They may be remnants of old wharves and jetties, perhaps salt marsh defences, or may have been connected to the Tide Mill. Our walk reminded me of the beauty of my native Suffolk landscape.

Woodbidge and the River Deben at low tide.

 

About 1,400 years ago, an Anglo-Saxon ship passed by where we walked bearing the body of a chieftain or king and treasures, now in the British Museum, that were to be buried with him at Sutton Hoo on the opposite bank of the river. The ship was 26 metres long, made with the wood of eight trees, 26 ribs, 3,598 iron or copper rivets. In a shed near the Tide Mill work has been underway since 2018 to build a replica of the burial ship using the techniques of 7^th-century Anglo-Saxon ship makers.

 

The Sutton Hoo replica under construction.

 

 

The structure of the external parts of the ship have been calculated from the records of the archaeological excavation at Sutton Hoo. However, the internal structures of the ship had been removed, probably to make the ship lighter to drag up the hill to its burial site, and to accommodate the burial chamber in its centre. Those parts of the ship are being reconstructed using partial data from Sutton Hoo, supplemented by information gleaned from other ship remains of a similar age. The Sutton Hoo ship was certainly propelled by oars. Whether it also had a mast and sails is a matter of conjecture.

A scale model of the ship.

 

The launch is planned for summer 2027.

An outing in Copperopolis

John Peacock, who was the production director for my large reference works when I worked at Macmillan, and I have fallen into the habit of treating ourselves to explorations of assorted provincial towns and cities. Our visits have two objectives: to watch a match involving either Derby County (John’s hometown) or Ipswich Town (mine). Our most recent visit was to Swansea (known to its Welsh-speaking citizens as Abertawe, or Moth of the [River] Tawe), the second city of Wales.

The city sits by the sands of Swansea Bay, where the Tawe flows down from the Welsh hills, and housing climbs up the hills in the opposite direction. Our hotel was once the home of the Harbour Trust from which the industrialists, merchants and shipowners managed the trade of one of the world’s preeminent ports. Constructed in 1902, the building speaks of a city of great commercial confidence that was not reluctant to spend money to proclaim its status. Over the main stairs is a dome with eight stained glass roundels, representing the points of the compass. A large stained-glass panel facing the current restaurant proclaims with assertive pride the city’s role: navigation, circumnavigation, commerce.

Morgan's Hotel, formerly the headquarters of the Swansea Harbour Trust.

 

Our first stop was the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, founded by one of the preeminent copper families of Swansea. The founder of the family fortune was John Henry Vivian (1785-1855), who made Vivian & Son, one of the most successful copper businesses in the city. Indeed, possibly the world’s most important copper processor, for in the 18^th- and 19^th-centuries copper arrived by sea to Swansea’s port from Cornwall, Devon, the Americas, Africa and Australia. Hence Swansea/Abertawe’s nickname, Copperopolis. John Henry was not only a powerful businessman; he was the city’s MP for 23 years. His commanding statue stands in Ferrara Square (Swansea is twinned with Ferrara) by the marina. John Henry had four sons who inherited the firm, but Richard Glynn (1835-1910), the fourth son, was evidently not considered by his siblings suitable to be involved in the business. Instead, he devoted himself to cultural travel, collecting and philanthropy. He laid the foundation stone of his gallery, which opened the year following his death, to house his collection. The permanent collection consists mostly of Welsh landscapes, and other aspects of Welsh and Swansea’s life: a splendidly evocative painting of cockle pickers, for example.

Statue of John Henry Vivian, Ferrara Square, Swansea.

Copper made its way to Swansea because of the city’s strategic advantages: a large port, access to Welsh coal and a workforce of adult men and women, and of children. Copper was soon followed by the processing of other metals, such iron and tin plate (by the 1890s 80% of the world’s production) as the Swansea Waterfront Museum informed us. Swansea also processed Welsh slate and made ceramics. 

A rather rusty Trinity House lightship in Swansea Marina.

With the boom in metals came technology and new means of transport and communication: “In 1800 horseback was the fastest way to travel on land. A century later, most of the world had rail networks and trains travelling up to sixty miles per hour. This transformation in world history was initiated in south Wales with Richard Trevithick’s Steam Locomotive in 1804.”

Trevithick's locomotive (a replica).

“Coal wagons … began appearing on the UK rail network in the mid-nineteenth century. The Ocean Coal Company is painted on one side [of coal wagon in the museum] - in its heyday one of the foremost producers of steam coal in south Wales.”

An Ocean Coal Company wagon.

 Modern technology is also represented by a Stanhope Imperial hand printing press, made in Soho, London, in 1830. By 1879 a steam press was printing The Cambrian newspaper in Wind Street, close to the harbour.

The Stanhope handprinting press.

In 1910, Charles Horace Watkins claimed to have flown his Robin Goch (Red Robin), the first monoplane built in Wales, which he built between 1907 and 1909 of wood and canvas. The pilot’s seat was a kitchen chair and an egg timer was a navigation aid (I am not sure exactly how it functioned). A ball bearing in a cradle told the pilot if he was flying level. Two weights dangling under the plane, one 10 feet long and one 20 monitored the flying height. Watkins was nothing if not ingenious.

Watkin's Robin Goch.

Our final stop was the Swansea Museum, the oldest museum in Wales, founded in 1841 by the Royal Institution of South Wales. The displays have a decidedly Victorian flavour. There is a room of stuffed animals and bones:, including two condors, an American eagle, a cobra grasping a mongoose, and some rather sad desiccated and flattened skins of voles. A small room devoted to the prehistory of Swansea and its area includes mammoth tusks.

The stuffed animal and bones room.

But the star of the show is the Red Lady of Paviland. In the 1820s three local vocational archaeologists, Lewis Dillwyn, Lady Mary Cole and Miss Talbot of Penrice Castle, were alerted to the discovery of animal remains in Paviland Cave. They wrote to the Reverend William Buckland, a geologist at Oxford University, and in 1823 he conducted the first scientific cave excavation in Britain. He discovered the partial remains of the Red Lady (her bones stained by hematite in the cave). She has now turned out to be a young gentleman and the latest dating suggests he is 33,000-34,000 years old. He was buried with ochre and ivory offerings. His is the oldest ceremonial burial of a modern human in Western Europe.

The "Red Lady", now a gentleman.

The young receptionist at our hotel told us that, although damaged, the building fortunately survived the bombing raids of World War II. According to his account, one area nearby is locally known as the Red; so great was the destruction that all that was left of the buildings there was red grit and dust (and contaminants such as arsenic from the city’s metalworking past). This was a story told in more detail in a room in Swansea Museum. The most severe damage was inflicted by the Three Nights Blitz from 19-21 February 1941. The commercial heart of the city was razed, but the docks and factories, which were the targets of the raids, were mostly undamaged. And somehow the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, the Castle and Swansea Museum escaped harm.

Swansea Castle (photo John Peacock).

As for the football, John had a good night: Swansea 1- Derby 2.

A Public Service Broadcast

 

My American friends will probably not have heard of the BB’s annual Reith Lectures, named after John Reith, founder of the BBC. These are given annually by a distinguished figure and broadcast on Radio 4. This year’s lecturer is a Dutch historian, Rutger Bregman.

 

The BBC describes Bregman’s lectures thus:

“Titled Moral Revolution, the lectures will delve into the current 'age of immorality', explore a growing trend for unseriousness among elites, and ask how we can follow history’s example and assemble small, committed groups to spark positive change.

Bregman's 2025 Reith Lectures will reflect on moments in history, including the likes of the suffragette and abolitionist movements, which have sparked transformative moral revolutions, offering hope for a new wave of progressive change. Across four lectures, he will also consider the explosive technological progress of recent years - placing us at a moment of immense risk and possibility, and will look ahead to how we might shape the future.”

 

The lectures have been much in the news recently here in the UK because the BBC, on legal advice, has cut from one of his lectures Bregman’s description of Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” I do not approve of censorship and bullying of publications and media, so I am notifying my tiny audience of this cowardly censorship.

 

I only once consulted a libel lawyer in 40 years of publishing. The book concerned was the Truth and Reconciliation Report, produced by the South African government after the end of Apartheid. It provided the opportunity for those who had participated in violent repression, torture and murder to confess what they had done. The lawyer told me not to publish because it libelled many people as murderers and torturers, and thus destroyed their reputation. I argued that they had no reputation because they had confessed. My boss and I agreed that we could not libel thugs and criminals ignores the lawyer.

 

Is it possible to damage Mr. Trump’s reputation? Opinions welcome.

How to spot a Mexican by the way (s)he speaks

 

One of my reads on our last visit to Mexico trip was Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s Tirano Banderas: novela de Tierra Caliente. Valle-Inclán (1866-1936) was a Spanish poet, novelist, playwright, essayist and journalist. When I was a student, it was his poetic works, especially his sonatas, Primavera, Estío, Otoño and Invierno (Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter) rather than this novel that were in the curriculum.

 

However, he visited Mexico twice, in 1892-1893 during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, and in 1921 when the revolutionaries who had deposed Díaz had finally triumphed. He met Francisco I. Madero, the leader of the 2010 Revolution and the first revolutionary president. This must have been in 1892-1893, before Madero became an important opposition political figure, since he was assassinated in 1913. One of the characters of Tirano Banderas, don Roque Cepeda, a mystic and idealist, is clearly based on Madero. Various other figures clearly had Mexican originals, such as Doctor Atle, a reference to the artist and writer Gerardo Murillo, whose pseudonym was Dr. Atl (atl being the Nahuatl for water).  Tirano Banderas, the dictator of Santa Fe, is advised by científicos (followers of European knowledge and the philosophy of Auguste Comte) as was Porfirio Díaz. Valle-Inclán also became a friend of Álvaro Obregón, one of the most important revolutionary generals, and himself president of Mexico from 1920-1924.

 

The novel reflects aspects of the Mexico that Valle-Inclán knew, but the imagined country in which it is set, Santa Fe de Tierra Firme, is clearly not one hundred percent Mexico. The capital is a fetid port, a tropical hothouse, while Mexico City is set in a high, temperate mountain valley. The dictator chews coca, an addiction of the high Andes of South America, not Mexico.

 

Valle-Inclán was one of the Generation of ’98, a literary group that sought ways to respond to the shock of the Spanish-American war of 1898. In Tirano Banderas he sought a unity of Spain’s lost empire by creating a literary language that reflected the many kinds of Spanish spoken throughout the Hispanic world, of which Castilian was (and still is) a minority. My edition includes a 16-page glossary of non-Castilian vocabulary, including many Mexicanisms and Nahuatl terms, but also the Spanish of Argentina, Chile, words from the speech of gypsies and so on. This vocabulary does not make for an easy read.

 

In Mexico, people assume from my looks that, like most visitors from overseas (the majority being from the USA) I speak little or no Spanish and almost always with a heavy English accent. When I respond in Spanish they often try to guess where I am from, always without success. They are puzzled, because a lot of what I say sounds like them, but they can see that I most certainly am not Mexican.

 

My first education in how to speak Mexican was in the summer of 1972 at the daily tertulia (afternoon coffee gathering) of my landlady Consuelo Cevallos and a group of her neighbours. It took time to attune my ear to the chat, but once I could follow the conversation, I joined in. Although I was admitted to the tertulia, the ladies asked me “Why do you speak like that? Why don’t you speak like us?” Over that long summer, I discovered that life was much easier and more enjoyable if I spoke to the Mexicans I met in their own variety of Spanish. My spoken Spanish was further polished by many nights in the bar of the Camino Real hotel and at the subsequent poker games with a group of young students who befriended me. From them I learned a Mexican Spanish that was far less polite than that of Consuelo’s ladies.

 

Language, of course, is not just a mechanical means of communication, but a window into culture. For example, Mexicans tend to be more elaborately courteous than Spaniards. If you read early colonial Spanish documents, there is an elaborate emphasis on status and formal politeness. And the Indigenous societies that Spain now ruled were very hierarchical and emphasized courtesy and self-deprecation in their rhetoric. It is hardly surprising that Spanish and Indigenous forms should result in a Mexican emphasis on politesse and deference. For example, in Castilian, if I do not quite understand what somebody has said to me, I might respond “¿Qué me dijo?” (What did you say?) but in Mexico the phrase is “¿Mande usted?” (literally What are your orders?). I was once told in Valencia, when I used just that phrase, that I should not be so servile. Similarly, the Mexican “A sus órdenes” (At your orders) is rarely if ever heard in Spain.

 

Then there are the words that come from Nahuatl and other native languages. Chocolate (chocolatl) has passed to Mexican, Castilian and English speakers. Tomate and tomato are similarly of Nahuatl origin, but Mexicans retain jitomate, a word closer to the Nahuatl xitomatl; tomate means that green fruit with a thin brown husk that Americans call tomatillo. Nahuatl terms for everyday objects similarly passed into Mexican Spanish: huipil (Nahuatl huipilli) is a woman’s blouse. A petate (petatl)rather than an estera) is a mat, and a popote (not a pajita) is a drinking straw. . A young child might be referred to affectionately by a Mexican as an escuincle or escuintle. Similarly, a man might refer to a male friend as guëy (pronounced like weigh) from the Nahuatl huey (man). The Aztec emperor was known as the huey tlatoani (the man who speaks). Tlatoani passed into Mexican Spanish to denote an Indigenous chieftain. Terms also moved the other way. The Spanish mandón (bossy boots) in colonial Mexico meant a minor official, not a jumped-up bossy character.

 

And, of course, Spain was very remote from Mexico, so that the two varieties of Spanish developed differently over time, especially after independence in 1821. In essence, Mexican Spanish became a variant of 16^th/17^th-century Castilian. I once had to pacify a director of the Alhambra, who had been annoyed by the editing of his text. As soon as he heard my Spanish he commented “Oiga, habla usted el español de Cervantes” (“You speak the Spanish of Cervantes”). His irritation disappeared and we became friends.

 

A mannerism that is much more frequently used in Mexican Spanish than in Castilian is the frequent (even prolific) use of the diminutive. A Mexican would often ask for “un cafecito”, a Spaniard for “un café”; in Mexico “unas tortillitas”, in Spain “unas tortillas”, or please (“por favor”) might become “por favorcito” The overall effect in Mexican speech is to convey great pleasure and self-deprecation.

 

Some phrases tell you much about cultural differences between Mexico and Spain. In my experience, it is quite rare for a Spaniard to invite you to her/his home, preferring instead to host a meal in a restaurant. Mexicans, on the other hand, are proud to invite one to their home, especially a foreigner or a person of high status. The guest is welcomed with the phrase “Está usted en su casa”, “Aquí tiene su casa” (literally This is your home”) or something similar that expresses pride and pleasure in your visit.

 

The formal usted form of verbs has been almost completely abandoned in Spain; but in Mexico it is still regularly heard, even if I now hear some shocking uses of the informal tú. However, it will take a long time for Mexicans to abandon the prolific use of titles to address one: licenciado (a person with a first degree); arquitecto, ingeniero, or more simply jefe (boss).

 

Then there are the words that just mean something different. If you are told that a camión will take you to Oaxaca to visit that beautiful city you should expect a bus (autobús for a Spaniard for whom a camión is a lorry) and you should board it at the central camionera not the estación de autobuses. I recall once landing unexpectedly at JFK airport in New York because my plane had a fault that required a long runway (and waiting fire engines). A Puerto Rican employee of Eastern Airlines addressed us in an English which was almost entirely incomprehensible. A group of elegantly dressed Mexican businessmen asked her if “¿Nos van a llevar en camión?” (Will we be taken by bus?), to which the airline employee replied in appalling Spanish as if addressing peasants: “¿Un camión? Un camión es una trocka!”  

 

The verb chingar (never to be used in polite company), and its derivatives, is so rich a vein of Mexican slang that the Noble prize-winning poet Octavio Paz devoted a small essay to it in his book El Laberinto de la Soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude). My Spanish dictionary cites five definitions:  rather demurely, to annoy; more frankly, to copulate; to steal, as in “me chingaron el dinero” (they stole my money); to kill, in my experience usually figuratively (“ya se me chingó el carro”: my car is done for); to finish something, as in “se chingaron todo el pastel” (they scoffed the whole cake). One could add several meanings and derivatives. A boastful Mexican might claim to be “el más chingón” (the very best; more politely he might be “el mero mero”, the bees knees). Another derivative, una chingadera means “a lot” or “ a ton of” (as in “gané una chingadera de dinero jugando poker”: I won a ton of money playing poker).

 

A word that trips up many Castilian speakers is the verb coger, for which my dictionary gives many meanings, of which the most common usage is to take, hold or catch: as in take an apple from the tree or money from a purse; hold a package; catch a bus; and so on. But in Mexico its meaning is invariably just one: the expletive equivalent of the English F word. The usual Mexican alternative is agarrar (defined as “to take or seize strongly, especially with the hand”); i.e. to grab. I was once severely chided for my use of agarrar instead of coger by a client in Barcelona, whose company distributed my reference books, and who moved in high social circles (he sailed with King Juan Carlos). He was greatly amused by the way I speak Spanish, but when, at the end of our lunch, I asked “Dónde puedo agarrar un taxi” (Where can I get a taxi?), he reprimanded me sternly: “Aquí no se agarran sino que se cogen” (Here we don’t grab them, we catch them”).

 

Finally, there are considerable differences of pronunciation and tone. The lisped Spanish ‘c’ before the vowels ‘e’ and ‘I’ and ‘z’ before all vowels, is always an ‘s’ in Mexico (consequently, Mexicans frequently misspell words: e.g. cocer (to cook) and coser (to sew) are commonly both spelled coser. In place names an ‘x’ is either a ‘sh’ or a guttural ‘ha’ (like the Spanish ‘j’): Xochimilco (Shochimilco) or Oaxaca (Wahaca). And the charming girl’s name Xochi (Nahuatl for flower) is Shochi. Vowels tend to be pronounced rather longer in Mexico than in Spain.

 

In tone, Mexican Spanish is much lighter, more musical on the tongue, and much less guttural than Castilian. To my ear, at least, Mexican speech has a musicality that Castilian lacks. And social interactions in Mexico are more formal (a Spaniard might say deferential) and elaborate. A speaker in a shop or restaurant in Spain who is more familiar with Mexican social norms may find Spaniards much more direct and forthright/brusque: the overall impression is that one is engaged in a business transaction which is to be briskly conducted; in Mexico, the interaction will be longer and more formally polite.

 

Lest my Castilian-speaking friends consider me unduly prejudiced against Iberian Spanish and Spanish society, we recently resumed our visits to Spain: a few days in Valencia and a delightful stay at the Voramar hotel on the beach in Benicassim lulled to sleep by the sound of waves of the Mediterranean are a great pleasure. But Mexico and its language has a special appeal which endures.

Colouring history in Puerto Vallarta

 

One of the not very useful facts that I know from my studies of Mexican history is that in 1582 cochineal was being produced in Chilapa in the mountains of Guerrero, and a few years later in Huamuxtitlán, Olinalá, Tlapa and Ahuacuotzingo. The little insect Dactylopius coccus was used to produce a dye much in demand in the textile workshops of Mexico City.

 

But while I had read about cochineal I had never seen it, and had no idea how the dye was made nor what colours it produced, until Jan and I paid our annual visit to a shop called Casa Oaxaca in Puerto Vallarta. The shop is the retail outlet of a cooperative of Indigenous textile workers in Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, a drive of more than 1,300 kilometres so Google informs me.

 

In front of a loom were several baskets each containing different dyeing materials. There was indigo from plants of the Indigofera genus, pods of a shrub called huizache (Vachellia farnesiana) whose seeds produce blacks and greys; a mineral used to break down the lanolin of wool so that dyes can be absorbed.

 

And there was a basket of a shiny material that I took to be small stones, but was in fact the dried bodies of the cochinilla insect. It feeds on the sap of prickly pears, in three months growing to about one centimetre. These are voracious little creatures as our son Chris told me later: they ate the prickly pear in his garden in San Vicente in no time at all. But the textile workers of Teotitlán love them: they infect prickly pears with a male and female and wait for them to multiply and suck the plant dry.

 

The young man who served us gave me a demonstration. He crushed some cochineal in his hand, applied a few drops of lime juice; a red stain appeared on his hand. Then he added a little ground chalk to produce a different shade; next slaked lime for another shade. With judicious application of a variety of alkaloids, a range of reds can be produced. So here the historian who knew about the cultivation of cochineal almost 500 years ago was given a beginners class in how it is used to produce goods for tourists today.

 

These insects little have other uses. They are edible, but apparently have no great flavour. They can be used as a food colouring, and are added to mezcal.