The use of obituaries to report the deaths of acquaintances became popular in the 19th century, when the advent of printing and newspapers allowed families to communicate the deaths of their loved ones. Also details of their respective funerals. Long before, civilizations such as the Greek, Roman and Egyptian offered their own funeral rites, engraving their names and data on stones, to preserve the memory of their ancestors. Last Thursday, November 21, was
“Son of Gaius Cuius and Lucrezia Cuia, widower of the vocative comma, brother of the initial question mark (deceased), of the initial exclamation mark (deceased), of the twin colons after the salutation in an email (deceased) and of the semicolon (dying)”, was the farewell message. “The small family he leaves behind ask for prayers for his soul and are grateful for the expressions of affection received. The burial will take place in the strictest privacy,” the letter concludes.
The next day, the label published a new press release. “We have no problem,” they commented by way of introduction to the new death, that of the word “eleventh”: “According to what they say, following the stabbings he received inflicted on his brother Eleventh and his putative brother Eleventh during a family feud. The author of the ironic obituaries is Alfonso Caspán, editor-in-chief of Contraseña, who explains to this newspaper that their origin was two other publications that he found on social networks, in which a writer and an English teacher commented that the “whose” had been lost.
They said it seemed like “people had forgotten” the term and the idea came to them to “tell it gracefully,” to do it as if it were an obituary. The editor is in charge of the company’s social networks: “Small publishers don’t have the press offices of the big ones, so you have to live off the networks,” he emphasizes, adding “jokes” and other “incidents”. » which expand the story of their profiles beyond promoting their books. Currently, they have around 20,000 subscribers on X and 2,000 on Bluesky.
The housing problem
Beyond the information on the disused words in question, Casán provided other spelling data, also thanks to the reactions that the publications received – the first tweet accumulated almost 400,000 views, 1,000 retweets and 5,000 likes – . After some “missed the point” in some of his sentences, he clarified: “In this type of text (centered paragraphs and separation by a blank line or several) it is not necessary to put it. »
The great response to the tweet about “whose” motivated me to continue the series with “eleventh”. Subsequently, he decided to further politicize his initiative with the obituary of the “tabuco”, which he expressly dedicated “to the owners who bleed their tenants, to the owners of tourist rentals and, in general, to all those who have made necessary to have a decent house “In this country, it’s an odyssey.” “Please read Article 47 of the Constitution for your soul,” he asks.
The editor comments that tabuco was a word used in the 19th century: “Galdós used it a lot.” “It’s a very small room and I wanted to allude to terms that are now used to sell slums for a fortune: ‘the bachelor’s apartment’ or ‘the ideal storage room for self-employment’,” describes -he in the death note. that from the responses he received he detected that it was causing a few blisters. “The more people see something, the easier it is for someone to come in discouraged,” he laments.
A prayer for unrealized goals in 2024
Caspán continued with his particular series of obituaries, to address the disappearance of “scientific knowledge” on social networks, “despite the efforts of many people”. This time, he counted among his close friends “his wife, the University, and his children, the CSIC, Aemet, the Spanish Association of Vaccinology”.
“The popularizers of history who have never set foot in an archive in their life, the flatists, the creationists, the anti-vaccines, the denialists, the conspiracy theorists and the talkers who think about climate change and do not cannot distinguish a cirrus from a cirrus. a cumulonimbus, participate with their friends in such a joyful loss,” he added in the communication. He announced that this group of people would perform at the party planned for last Sunday, during which the Chemtrails [vieja teoría de la conspiración, desmontada una y otra vez por la ciencia, que vinculan las estelas que dejan las aeronaves con supuestos daños sobre la salud y el medioambiente].
The last obituary – for the moment – published is that of “good resolutions for the year 2024”, which he defined as “parents signing up for a gym”. Read the UlyssesPlay sports, Learn English, Stop smoking, Read it QuixoteRead it Divine ComedyDiet, Learn German, Spend more time with family” and much more. “His children ask for a prayer for his soul and hope that The Good Objectives for 2025 will adopt them,” he emphasizes at the end.
“How many good resolutions do we normally fail to keep? Almost all of us do a lot and at the end of January we already realize that we are not going to achieve them,” says Alfonso Casán. The editor, who jokes that his publications “are going to look like ABC’s obituary sessions,” says he created them based on what “happened to him.” Their plan is to “take a break”, which may not happen if they continue to come up with new ideas to increase their ingenious collection of death notes.
