Who Guards the Language? Alex Grijelmo Enters the Royal Spanish Academy
There's a question I ask myself every time the Real Academia Española does something: for whom, exactly, is it? Not as an insult. As a genuine question. The RAE has existed since 1713, "limpia, fija y da esplendor" — cleans, fixes, and gives splendor to the Spanish language — and in all that time, the language has changed in ways the institution didn't always predict and sometimes didn't celebrate. This week, the academy elected Álex Grijelmo to occupy the "o" seat. Which is interesting.
Grijelmo, journalist and former president of the EFE news agency, is not an academic in the traditional sense. He's someone who spent his career thinking about language from inside journalism, not from lecture halls. He's written about the seduction of words, about grammar without fear, and more recently about La perversión del anonimato — the first book in Spanish to address the ways anonymity is both essential and dangerous online. He also wrote the official biography of Les Luthiers, the Argentine comedy troupe that has, more than any other group, taken seriously the possibility that humor and linguistic rigor are the same thing.
So: what is someone who's spent his career writing about how words deceive us doing in the RAE? Perhaps exactly what the RAE needs. The institution doesn't need more philologists talking to each other. It needs people who have been in the trenches of the living language — in newsrooms, in press conferences, in opinion columns where Spanish mutates in real time.
There is always tension between institutions that guard and languages that escape. Spanish doesn't wait for anyone's permission to invent new words, mix registers, absorb anglicisms, create slang. The RAE always arrives a little late — that's actually its job: to systematize what has already happened. And into that role comes Grijelmo, who has spent decades documenting how language betrays, seduces and defines us.
Will anything change dramatically with his arrival? Probably not. But there's something about a journalist who has written about digital anonymity entering an institution where the chairs have their own names — chair "o," nothing more — that strikes me as a perfect paradox. The guardian of language in the era of the unsigned tweet. Welcome, Álex.
