TEASE

Many, many years ago I was work­ing in an adult ed­u­ca­tion cen­tre in Hos­pi­talet de Llo­bre­gat when I couldn’t help notic­ing the T-shirt being worn one day by the girl at re­cep­tion. It was white, ex­cept for a sin­gle sen­tence printed in black right at the level of the tips of her breasts: ’TOO HOT TO HAN­DLE’. I asked her in all con­fi­dence if she knew what it meant and she said no. I trans­lated, apolo­get­i­cally, and after hav­ing slapped a hand over her mouth in em­bar­rass­ment, she slung a jer­sey over the of­fend­ing words (many of the peo­ple she had been at­tend­ing that day were stu­dents of Eng­lish).

More re­cently, there has been a def­i­nite uptick in the num­ber of Cata­lans wear­ing tees with Eng­lish slo­gans, and not just the ones that func­tion as paid ads for com­pa­nies like Jack & Jones, which splashes its name over its prod­ucts in fonts so large their wear­ers might as well be car­ry­ing sand­wich boards. But it’s slo­gans and sen­tence which are re­ally in fash­ion. For ex­am­ple, just in the last cou­ple of weeks, there have been sev­eral more or less pre­dictable sight­ings of T-shirts using the word ’love’ such as TRUE LOVE and, more con­fus­ingly, SUN LOVE. Other slo­gans tend to be a lot more sur­pris­ing: seen on the metro was a man whose ap­parel made it very clear that WE’RE HAPPY TO SERVE YOU, al­though there was no in­di­ca­tion that he was about to serve any­thing to any­body, any­where. Or, for in­stance, an ap­par­ently con­tented look­ing woman seen on Barcelona’s Pas­seig Fabra i Puig felt the need to de­clare THIS IS THE END, a mes­sage off­set min­utes later on the same street (I’m not mak­ing this up) by a man ask­ing for FIVE MORE MIN­UTES.

But it was Bany­oles – where I half live – that pro­vided some truly baf­fling leg­ends. One man’s back was cer­tain that LEAD PIPES SAVE LIVES, which is not the case at all; ac­cord­ing to Wikipedia, and I quote: ’lead is no longer per­mit­ted for new potable water pip­ing in­stal­la­tions due to its tox­i­c­ity’. It was only later that I found out LEAD was a mis­spelling of LOUD, as in LOUD PIPES SAVE LIVES, a bik­ers’ motto which claims that the louder a bike’s ex­haust pipes, the bet­ter the chances of avoid­ing mo­tor­cy­cle ac­ci­dents (this is not true ei­ther, by the way). But the phrase which re­ally flum­moxed me was GET YOUR GROOT ON. I more or less tried to parse this sen­tence, given that ’groot’ is the Dutch word for ’big’, lead­ing to the con­clu­sion that it was some­thing to do with big­ging one­self up (in Ja­maican par­lance). It wasn’t until I looked it up for this ar­ti­cle that I re­alised how com­pletely out of touch I was with cer­tain cor­ners of pop­u­lar cul­ture, Groot being a tree-like char­ac­ter in Mar­vel’s ’Guardians of the Galaxy’ fran­chise (al­though I still don’t un­der­stand the sen­tence on that T-shirt any bet­ter).

Of course, this ar­ti­cle could go on and on, given that of all the slo­gans on T-shirts worn in Cat­alo­nia, around 95% are in Eng­lish, de­spite fre­quently not being un­der­stood by their own wear­ers. But why? After all, in the Eng­lish-speak­ing world, peo­ple don’t ha­bit­u­ally walk around wear­ing slo­gans in, say, French, Ger­man or Span­ish, and much less Cata­lan. I fi­nally found the an­swer in the form of a tote bag worn by the cus­tomer stand­ing next to me in the local butcher’s: ’SI AQUE­STA BOSSA ES­TIGUÉS EN ANGLÈS, MO­LARIA MÉS’. Which is Cata­lan for: ’If it was in Eng­lish this bag would be cooler’. Voilà!