La Sota De Copas

"Aqui estamos, al borde del acantilado. ¿Saltemos? Tu no sabes nadar. ¿No me confiares?" Ramon Nadie, La Sota de Copas #compraloenamazon

It came up on my twitter feed, in-between Trumpistas complaining about Alt-left tweets and snowflakes complaining about being unable to use the key at the bottom of the keyboard next to the spacebar. That's right, because it upset them to put their finger on something with alt-right written on it.

If you don't know Spanish – and why should you after all? English is undoubtedly your first language, why learn another? Everyone speaks English don't they? It's the language of business. Perhaps it is. For how long though? Mandarin and Cantonese might be good to learn. And "man"-skills, carpentry, making fire, hunting, you know. Anyway, we're not there yet, though it may be closer than all of us think.

So, (keeping you comfortable, see) the tweet is a quotation, you know that from your degree course, right? After the quote marks, is the author first or the book? Well, it's twitter so the academic conventions and indeed accuracy may not necessarily apply. Ramon is a good Hispanic first name, even sounds macho, doesn't it? You can see the hashtag: it's got “amazon” at the end, you saw that, didn't you? Okay, I'm stringing it out. The first sentence: it says “Here we are, on the edge of a cliff?” See the second sentence? There's an upside down “?” at the beginning. You have to do that when you write a question in Spanish. I'd guess the tweeter is quite old. He (if it is a he) thinks only having 280 characters available is a high price to pay for incorrect punctuation. How about that? Twitter is killing punctuation.

“¿Saltemos?” “Shall we jump?”

Hmm… would you? I know, you need more information. The last two sentences in the quote are a statement and another question.

“You can't swim. ¿Don't you trust me?”

I'm hooked. Who is Ramon Nadie? Well, we'll see. And “La Sota De Copas? Copas are the cups in the Tarot, hearts in real cards. He's the Knave of Hearts, or the Jack, if you're a Dylan fan and like that song from Blood on the Tracks. Ah yes, Bob Dylan that is, that old guy they made a fuss about over the Nobel Prize. Maybe you saw it on social media? Not Facebook, I know that's for old people, like me, maybe like Ramon Nadie, too.

Like soooo… annoying, the hashtag, I mean. It means buy it on Amazon. Go on type it in, see what you get.

So what do you do? Same as me. Cut and paste the title, if that's what it is…

Yep. You got it, tarot sites and some black and white youtube vids of some portly guy of Hispanic roots singing in Spanish. It's nice and all, but it's not “Despacito”.

Of course, I did google the name. Ramon Nadie. I found exactly what I expected. “Nadie” is Spanish for “Nobody”, after all.

Footnote: The Knave of Cups in a tarot reading means good news...