Down with the short rule of Portuguese! – 05/04/2023 – Sérgio Rodrigues

“Short rule” is the excellent name that the linguist Carlos Alberto Faraco gives to a certain dogmatic set of grammatical rules, arbitrary vetoes, uncritical attachment to the Lusitanian variety of the language and pranks in general.

Note that I am not talking about the cultured norm, the register of the language actually used by the more educated layers of the population. This has an essential social role and should be taught more efficiently – not less – in school.

I’m referring to the short rule, which no one actually talks about, but we pretend that they do, and which turns out to be an idealized, caricatured, stupid and petty version of that one. In the end, its enemy, as it turns the study of the Portuguese language into hostile territory for an immense majority of the population.

“Oh, how difficult our language is!”, we say almost all. Difficult at all, or we wouldn’t have learned to speak it in early childhood. It has its quirks, like every language, and lovingly unveiling them should be a pleasure. Insanely difficult is the short rule, which derives its livelihood from this difficulty.

Reactionary to the point of making a conservative grammarian like Napoleão Mendes de Almeida sometimes look like Marcos Bagno, obsessed with memorizing and a lover of the just-because-it-is, the short rule unfortunately has immense power.

It is what moves the Portuguese concurseiro industry and the grammar offices on the internet. It is she who, via Enem, forces teenagers to fill their essays with “othersim” and other juridical debris.

The short norm doesn’t care if you can read and interpret a text. What does it matter? It is essential that you recite the list of “figures of speech” in alphabetical order while balancing a ball on your nose. Are you going to tell me that you don’t know about zeugma?

Students capable of memorizing the tricks and avoiding the pitfalls that the short standard calls Portuguese tests join a privileged group of short standard students.

Their effort is then rewarded and they, even those who are incapable of interpreting a simple paragraph, earn the right to oppress other speakers and humiliate those who have not reached the norm-curtism paradise.

The short norm is uneducated. He had never read Graciliano Ramos, Rubem Braga, Rachel de Queiroz and so many other Brazilian stylists who, over the last century, shaped a way of writing that sounds like music to the ears of those born here. Contemporary authors also shine by their absence. The short norm never read anything.

They read for her, it’s true. That was a long time ago: an Alexandre Herculano here, an Almeida Garrett there. All Portuguese. In these classics, dead readers since pre-modernism arbitrarily picked only what confirmed their dogmas. They were ready – for eternity – the tablets of the law.

The short rule fools many people with its pose as a defender of “good Portuguese”. All lie. It ignores more than a century of theoretical and practical knowledge on the subject, scorning great grammarians and mocking our greatest writers.

Yesterday I came across a demented case of norm-curtism: on the internet page of “dicas de português”, the cartoon with cute strokes shows the boy declaring himself to the girl (“I love you!”) and being corrected by her: “No whether you can start a sentence with an unstressed oblique pronoun”. Yes, she wanted to hear an “I love you!” lusitano, believe who you want.

The page has nearly a million followers. It seems to me that we are chipped.

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