One of the novel titles that I find most appropriate, because of its evocation and evolution of the world in spite of ourselves, is When we called champagne, by Rafel Nadal. It is a book that traces the history of a family, but what interests me specifically now is this title, which reflects the disappearance of a common word from the general vocabulary a few decades ago, which was replaced, by virtue of bureaucratic convictions, for the word cava.
Albert Jané continues to defend tooth and nail the use of champagne, as the dictionary of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans (DIEC) well reflects, even if the French industry is against it, because business interests are one thing and linguistic uses are another thing. Cognac that is not from the Cognac region has the word brandy on the label, and on the other hand I don’t know anyone who asks for “a glass of brandy” or “a cigalon of brandy”, rather “a glass of cognac” or “a cigalon of cognac”, wherever this distillate is from.
But it is true that in the case of champagne, cava has made a big hole. I, who try to order champagne instead of cava, once met a prim-faced waiter who told me: “It’s cava, not champagne”, wanting to clarify that what was served did not come from Champagne. In any case, the mutation of champagne for cava is one of the many findings of how language evolves, in this case due to an extralinguistic issue.
Another case of succession of one word by another is that of the slides. With the appearance of computer programs that allow you to make presentations by projecting texts and images, it became popular to refer to them according to the brand of the Office package, that is, PowerPoint. Fortunately, today there is a certain linguistic awareness to avoid the trademark and there are speakers who call presentations, simply, presentations.
This correction made in a natural way has also caused some people to have recovered the word slides, which for many years was the pinnacle of modernity when presenting images in public. The word came to us from the French with the sense of diaphanous and positive, as opposed to photographic negatives.
But before they were called slides they had another name: filmines, derived from film. And in the midst of this string of words for the same thing (filmina, slide, PowerPoint, presentation), there are still those who could not avoid the anglicism and called it slides. In this whole story, I find that there are now those who call the presentations slides that is a kind of poetic linguistic justice.
