"On tits"

Pro-abortion demonstration in front of the Ministry of Justice in Madrid, September 2022.Guillermo Gutierrez Carrascal (S

Eva Amaral spoke on September 11 on Cadena SER's Hora 25 about her decision to sing bare-chested in front of 23,000 people at the Sonorama festival, on August 13 in Aranda de Duero (Burgos). In response to a question from Aimar Bretos, he said that as a teenager he had already heard recriminations for sunbathing "on tits."

I immediately remembered that I had written down that phrase for the first time in 1998, when on a beach I heard a swimmer say "I'm going to sunbathe on tits", a novel alternative to the then more widespread "I'm going to sunbathe top-less" (that is, "without the top"); or "I'm going to go topless". I used the anecdote in the book Passionate Defense of the Spanish Language, of that same year, as an example of the alternatives that the genius of the language —that imaginary being that governs a language— usually offers against Anglicisms when we give him time to come up with something (genius is slow).

This particular one was incorporated into the Dictionary in 2021, with the topless and top-less spellings, both in italics; and with two meanings: "Bar or place where work from the waist up" and "feminine way of dressing that leaves the breasts in the air". (Well, more than a way of dressing, it's a way of undressing.) Now the academies already collect the Spanishized and round writing: "toples"; a word that, seen in this way, could well be read separately in the syllables to and ples; Same as so and ples in "blows", for example. The definition has also been modified: "Female nude from the waist up".

I wrote down that use of "in tits" after hearing it in the series Cuéntame (TVE, chapter 243, in March 2013), when a child exclaims that Lola, an English cousin of the Alcántara, "has put herself in tits". And in 2018 the writer Marta Sanz already used it in her book Monstruas y centauras: "I in the eighties sunbathed in tits".

Right here I dedicated a few lines to the matter in March 2019 (The 'top ten', the 'top blanket' or the 'top-less') and pointed out that Google offered 3,290,000 results of "on tits". I have now asked the search engine and it already reflects 3,510,000 records (220,000 more). For its part, the crossing of "in tits" and "Amaral" provides 2,490 uses. For example: "Amaral, in tits" (caption in Superdeporte)."Singing on tits on stage meets all the requirements for praise and criticism to rain everywhere" (Mariola Riera, La Nueva España, de Oviedo). "The new doctrines of political correctness dictate that Eva has the right to stay on tits" (Vidal Arranz, Voxpópuli); "It is a condition sine quanum [sic] that bodies stop being an object of sexualization 'that prevents us from staying on boobs at a concert" (interview with artist Diana Montero in Vogue magazine). The database of current Spanish (Corpes), of the Royal Academy, delivers 19 written uses of this locution in books (most) and in the press; among them, 10 from Spain and 6 from Argentina, the country where the oldest is dated (Página 12 newspaper, 2001).

In short, the genius of the language has provided an accurate popular alternative to top-less Anglicism, and begins to be used in public. All this leads us to wonder if "in tits" should be added as a locution in the entry "tits" of the Dictionary, perhaps with the marks of "colloquial" and "Spanishism".

A statement by Jeanette on ABC on August 17 would come in support of that proposal, and I bring it as an authoritative quote. The interpreter of Soy rebelde and Porque te vas (that's the title, although she pronounces "por qué te vas"), born in London and resident in Spain since the sixties, avoided in the interview the term top-less, which she undoubtedly knows and will have used in her mother tongue, to say in Spanish clearly: "I was already riding boobs on the beach before Amaral was born."

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