Homogenization and Art

I was talking to a friend yesterday who told me he was teaching his young daughter not to use the word “coger” in Spanish (“to take”) because in some countries (the vast minority), the word has a sexual alternate meaning, just like the word “take” in English (Oh, baby, take me now). I smiled and said, “you can’t possibly bring up an international child,” to which he answered, “oh, yes, I can.”

Well, yes, I’m sure he could, but the question here is: why?

I can’t help but be sad at the potential loss of cultural flavor in this new era of market homogenization. Not to mention that by choosing certain words that are pan-adequate, we are unavoidably categorizing vocabulary and idioms as acceptable/not-acceptable, better/worse, ensuring that one bigger group will assimilate the smaller ones, as if their contribution to the richness of human kind were less valuable.

This also strikes me as a concern characteristic of minorities. With this specific case, we can see the mentality of the Hispanic minority in the English-speaking US. Perhaps we as Hispanics feel stronger as a group, but we might be going to extravagant lengths to ensure we can, indeed, be categorized as a group. The homogenization of our language is one of those sacrifices. But have you ever heard of an American parent teaching his or her children not to say they have a “bloody nose” but rather than their “nose is bleeding,” or not to describe the dog as “shaggy” but rather as “hairy” or “messy”? Certainly these words can evoke other thoughts when heard by the Brits, but no one really cares.

My deeper concern here is creativity, art. We live in a world that more and more is encouraging individuality and diversity of expression when it comes to individuals, yet foments assimilation and seamless integration when it comes to whole societies. Where does this leave art? How are we to produce truly distinct individuals with their own visual, musical, verbal trends of expression if we remove colors from the equation, rather than teaching how or what these colors and tools may perform or evoke in different environments?

Remove the local flavor influence, and you would not be able to tell apart Puccini from Bizet or Tchaikovsky. How will this impact our future geniuses?