According to the dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language (RAE), increasingly inclusive, in addition to goat, informer, pimp, man of prestige, cigar butt, luck, bus, bike, breaking news, hair on chin, craps, lie, embezzlementthe word “goat” has been recognized with the meaning of: “point to copy in the exams”.
As I passed through the Presbyterian schools, through the “Carlos Marx” high school, through the “Cepero Bonilla” pre-university, through the “Enrique José Varona” Pedagogical School and through the School of Letters of the University of Havana, I was able to appreciate the vast culture of the “goat”, accumulated by the creative imagination of Cubans, before Y after.
“Goats” in rolls of paper hidden inside cigarette boxes, pens, shoes, watch bands, pencil sharpeners; or glued in advance under the table of the desk; or thrown in the classroom in the form of a taco with a rubber band from one corner to another. The same happens with the equation of the perfect square trinomial, with the names of the salivary glands, the capitals of the Caribbean, the barbarian tribes, the satellites of Mars, as well as the three laws of dialectics, the accentuation rules in diphthongs, the Gay-Lussac gas law. All that, and much more, fit in a well-made “goat”.
Networks, Internet and the new “goats”
About twenty-one years ago, teaching at the University of Puerto Rico, I learned to use the network (Internet) to make goats. So, making a “goat” did not consist of walking with a laptop piggyback and bring her to class, because hardly anyone could. But it didn’t require much inventiveness; it was so easy. So much so that even I was able to notice when a student from Río Piedras brought me a course work done with the classic “cut and paste”. The young man, who did not bother to change the wording of the source, even put the illustrations of the original. Of course he was offended when I gave him the worst grade possible. “But tell me, what’s wrong?” He told me.
The essential concept of the “goat”, that is, of copying from another the knowledge necessary to “get by” in an exam, a class assignment or an exhibition, has been maintained in the Internet age, although with advanced means, far less intellectually demanding than those of my student days.
The question of the “goat” goes hand in hand with the reliability of the available sources to assure users of the fast knowledge that the new times demand.
A friend whom I esteem, and who consults the RAE and Wikipedia a lot, commented to me with some alarm a few days ago about the meaning of the word gender. He warned me that gender it’s not the same as sex, and that they had changed the definition in the dictionary after a psychologist said that they were not the same. A conception of gender is in force according to which the personal decision of the human being is what dictates how society should perceive him/her. He informed me (my friend) that there are about 114 genres. And each one wants to be called by the gender with which he identifies internally. In Spanish, he told me, it follows the same definition of gender always. And hence his conclusion that perhaps in Cuba (he has been living abroad for more than twenty years) that confusing distinction did not exist. The psychologist who had the idea to differentiate sex Y gender his name was John Money, he assured me.
When I asked my academic friends in the field of Sociology, Psychology, Anthropology, History, Cultural Studies, about the background of research on gender, they quoted Federico Engels, Sigmund Freud, Claude Lévi-Strauss , Simone de Beauvoir, Margaret Mead, Robert Stoller. Only one of them had heard of John Money and his experiments in the field of sexology in the 1950s, to support the distinction between sex Y gender.
Intrigued by the origin of the question, I went to the RAE’s Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts, one of my friend’s sources. There I read that “words have gender (and not sex), while living beings have sex (and not gender)”. So the RAE undertakes it against The country and other media that allegedly misuse the term, and put gender where should i go sex. For example, when discrimination is denounced: “The fair system would be one that does not assign rewards or punishments based on morally irrelevant criteria (race, social class, gender of each person)”. According to the RAE, in that sentence it should say “the sex of each person”.
I told my friend that gender it was a useful concept in the Social Sciences, beyond its use in political debate. That the gender thing is not reduced to its grammatical use or its biblical definition. And it is not “an ideology” either, except among those who use it to crush the feminist and LGBTIQ movements. A sociologist who uses the distinction between gender and sex, let’s say, does not necessarily share the discourse of “all, all, all, all, [email protected]”. And there was no need to look for smoking gun into a scientist who did certain experiments, nor paint him as some sort of Dr. Frankenstein. In any case, the gender vs sex It goes beyond the academic field, as a cultural and global problem that it is, associated with the social movements that I noted above.
My friend, frightened by the decline of the West, replied that if Sociology and Psychology have a special language, it is because they are part of the problem of conceptual relativism. The same as right and left, because the right defends one thing and the left the opposite. This is a very clearly ideological and central issue in today’s liberal-democratic societies, nothing to do with 90% of the world’s population. loans to the countries of the South”.
Lastly, he recommended that when dealing with American students, boys and girls, I take this conflict very seriously. gender–sex, as well as “the 114” gender denominations. Instead of referring to each one as “he” or “she”, the best thing was for each one to identify with her gender first, as a preventive measure, and learn her self-designations to avoid problems.
This simple example serves to illustrate the fact that not even the dictionaries of language doubts are a reference for theoretical questions of the Social Sciences; nor are Wikipedia articles a reliable source for writing essays, as if they were the Britannica.
Now, to be fair, and although my friend’s use of these sources is debatable, it does not constitute, strictly speaking, a “goat.” And I have only brought it up because your way of trusting those sources is relevant, because they are the same ones that some people use to show off their knowledge on social networks.
Internet pundits seem capable of tackling almost any event or topic, be it Ukraine’s history since the time of Yaroslav the Wise; the propaganda devices used by the Romanov family on the threshold of the Russian Revolution; the undertones of the anti-communist movements of the 1950s and 1960s in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia; the comparative macroeconomic indices of Cuba since the machadato; the factors that have determined the main migratory events on the Island in the last half century; the ethnic composition and cultural traditions of the British Isles since the invasions of Julius Caesar and William the Conqueror.
In theory, some will tell me, a single person can know about all that. Pico della Mirandola, Camila Henríquez Ureña, Ramiro Guerra, Andrés Bello, Marguerite Yourcenar or Alfonso Reyes could talk about things as dissimilar and even more recondite than these.
No “out of league” IQ is required to credibly move between a diversity of topics and data. A retention of those is enough, that everything sticks to them. Like that Borges character, Funes the Memorious, or Raymond the Autistic, which Dustin Hoffman played in rain man.
How to distinguish between authentic knowledge or itinerant archive and the “goat” that circulates in our networks as if it were his particular paddock?
Unlike what a historian of ideas or economics would do, an anthropologist of culture, a polygraph, a scholar, or a simple professor of pedagogy; unlike a memory-drawer, he capable of surprising us with his know-it-all natural; the “chivero” is distinguished, as the guajiros would say about birds, by its excreta.
I invite readers to an experiment in this territory, which I will provisionally call, for lack of a more exact term, “cellophane epistemology.”
Go through social networks and look for the topics they talk about, in particular, some that they write about every day, as if they had nothing else to do. It doesn’t matter if it’s about the anniversary of the Cuban capital or its takeover by the British, Padura’s most recent novel, the lack of powdered milk, a documentary about the Taliban imprisoned in Guantánamo, or the talks for the resumption of visas. . No matter the starting point, the motivation, the twists and turns you have to take, in the end there is a moral, always the same, that fatally reminds us of the Phoenician tale: the root of the problem, totally or partially, lies in nature. of the political regime.
I am going to do the same experiment. I bet you, like me, will be surprised. See you there.
