Storks and the City of Light

 

An interesting phrase I learned today

My Spanish is pretty good, but one of the nice things about being here is that I keep learning new idiomatic phrases, some of them somewhat dated, but which provide fascinating insights into the culture.  I may have mentioned the somber "hambre que sabe la hartura no es hambre" (literally "hunger which knows what it is to be full isn't hunger") which means that it's different being hungry when you know where your next meal is coming from and are looking forward to it and when you don't know when you'll eat again.  Obviously, this came up in the context of discussing the post-war period.

Today in class I learned a much lighter phrase, when discussing the gender theory of Judith Butler, a subject where sense of humor is generally severely lacking.  My Complutense mentor, in an explanation of how gender is a learned performance, told the story of overhearing a small child of three or four years old at a polideportivo being picked up from his swimming lesson and telling his father that "hoy aprendimos a nadar como señoras" ("today we learned to swim like ladies").  My mentor, emphasizing that the child was linking an inherently neutral action (a type of stroke) with being a "señora" added that this was clearly a child who was too small to have an adult conception of human sexuality and that he still "piensa que los niños vienen de París."



Possibly upon seeing the slightly puzzled faces of the multiple foreign students in the class my mentor stopped and said, "do the foreigners know that phrase?  That babies come from Paris?  In Spain, that's where the stork brings them from."

The two (more or less full grown) Parisian students in the class were understandably surprised to learn that (all) babies come from Paris, and the American students snickered, though whether in reference to Paris, babies, or storks I couldn't tell.

One wonders about the origin of this somewhat odd phrase.  Do storks bring babies from Paris to Spain the way the boat brings Sinterklaas from Spain to Holland with his white horse?  (The Schengen zone has proved tough on intra-European travel myths, since as the world shrinks it gets harder and harder to make them exotic.)  Or did Paris enjoy the same reputation as being a "city of lovers" in Spain as it did in the US, with the difference that because of its relative nearness it was actually a pretty common vacation destination for those Spaniards who could afford it, which meant that over-inquisitive children of the Spanish bourgeoisie were told that their little siblings "vienen de París" as a kind of in-group joke among the grown-ups?

I wonder if storks bring babies from Paris to other parts of Europe as well in other languages.  (And where do Parisian babies come from?  Do storks bring them from Amsterdam or London in French?)  Things to ponder.  I do enjoy getting to know languages better.