It would be remiss of me to move on from Seville without including at least one image of the ubiquitous N0 8 D0 sign that adorns anything even remotely to do with the city. "Ubiquitous" is not an exaggeration: it's on municipal buildings, on the buses, on police cars, public toilets, possibly tattooed on the mayor, there's no getting away from it.
What could it possibly mean? Well, pull up a chair for a little semiotics lesson, the only one you will encounter in this blog, I feel reasonably safe in promising. According to my superior guidebook, the explanation is as follows. The sign means "No me ha dejado", in English, "She has not deserted me", words attributed to Alfonso the Wise (no comment) after the city of Seville remained loyal to him during a dispute with his son Sancho (no information available on the astuteness, or otherwise, of Sancho, but I think we can draw our own conclusions) during the time of the Reconquest.
Here's the fun part. What you might first interpret as a figure 8 is, upon closer inspection, a stylized skein of wool, the Spanish word for which is madeja. Hence No m'a deja do.
If you don't find that even a little bit interesting, maybe this blog's not for you.
1 comment:
So much more interesting than OU812.
Bien!
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