Pegasus: the pitfalls of a name

They deceived him, they promised him what they knew they would never be able to give him, they enticed him with the promise that he would have the power and command of a territory.

But something already smelled of trickery, and we, readers of

that we saw what they promised Sancho Panza, we were already suspicious.

Because they told him that he would be governor, not of an island or an archipelago: they promised him an island called Barataria.

And with that name we already suspected that Sancho Panza would never govern, because no real territory is called an insula.

Ínsula is the name of a novel for gentlemen and ladies, but the land we walk on, real and rocky, has the name of an island, less airy and evocative.

Using a Latin term as an insula against the vernacular name of island, worn out by time, is a profitable way to give a lie a prestigious air.

Giving something a name, baptizing it, is an activity that seeks description, but that lands in the limited letters of a word the evocation that something provokes in us or that, interestedly, we want to suggest.

This has happened with the computer spy program that scandalizes us these days.

A program created for telephone snooping that defeats the encryption that we suppose protects the cell phone of a minister or a president could have been called by any technical name, with capital letters or numbers, like the robots in the first dystopian movies.

It could also have been designated with those traditional names of the comics where Mortadelo and Filemón acted as customary secret agents (I think of the alien Aoug, the secret agent Fantásmez or a Spytron).

That which wants to stop being offered as a compulsory subject in schools, mythology, taught us that Pegasus was the winged horse born from the blood spilled by Medusa.

And with that name, the resurrection of the Greco-Latin past in something as modern as a telephone spied on from a distance, a fleeting retention machine is baptized, a technological tool that gives wings to the intimacy of a conversation until it is stored in the dangerous arsenal of those who spy on us

Naming to cajole is a tournament of wits.

The

that makes us vulnerable through the mobile phone is a lot like the Trojan horse, the contraption that the Achaeans used to sneak into the fortified city of Troy and sneak ashore out of the belly of the wooden animal.

Our phones are our Trojan horses: we believe that they are a gift of freedom and solvency and they end up becoming the battering ram that destroys our privacy.

Naming a spyware Pegasus is a cunning exercise in recycling and appropriation.

If we think about what that word has of a historical journey, it is quite a cheek and a name of astonishing cheekiness.

The horse infuses, especially when it is called a steed or a pegasus, a deep poetic evocation.

If we Spanish speakers name it like this, horse, it is because in Vulgar Latin the classical Latin word was postponed:

.

Today we keep it for the feminine, mare, and in the educated derivatives (equine or equestrian) that derive from the old denomination, but for the animal we have preferred the name of

, a term that the Latin used to name the animal that carried the horse .

grain and that it was castrated so that it would serve better.

Vulgar Latin stopped considering the prestigious

and all equines were understood as

as pack animals.

While on a day-to-day basis people no longer thought of steeds but of the trusting animal that helped them move around the fields, the myth of Pegasus remained for sculptural friezes, for poetic allusions, for painters and for those who, taking advantage of what positive of so much evocation, they wanted to name their Trojan horse of the 21st century.

If one contained in the belly the threat of the warrior, the current horse, the brand new impostor, turns the guts of the cell phone into the intimidating horseman.

One was the pregnant horse of a Greek battle while the modern winged horse is the invisible threat that has caused a political tidal wave with some overreactions.

And the citizens, once again suspicious, are beginning to suspect that there is something deceitful in all this and that sometimes Spain seems cheap.

Lola Pons

is a philologist, professor of Spanish Language, Linguistics and Theory of Literature at the University of Seville.

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