From "lie, screw and run" to "it'll happen in October": the glossary that's fading away

The glossary nobody writes anymore: from "lie, screw and run" to "it'll happen in October"

There is a phrase that sums up half a decade of Spain's economic debates and is barely used today: "lie, screw and run". The variant that circulated afterwards, "lie, knock her up and run", works just as well to measure the wear and tear. An inventory of expressions that filled every page of Actualidad two years ago now reads like a graveyard of one-liners: some died of success, others of sheer secondhand embarrassment. The question is not which phrases were being said, but why they stopped being said.

The pattern is recognizable. Every phrase was born tied to a cycle: the housing bubble, the Euribor, the price of renting, block politics. When the cycle turned, the phrase was left orphaned. And that is where the real analysis begins.

From "renting is throwing money away" to "I'm not going to undersell"

Few sayings aged so fast. "Buying a home is throwing money away, renting is best" coexisted for years with its opposite, "renting is throwing money away", and both were wielded with equal faith. The result is that today nobody dares defend either one without adding three caveats and a disclaimer.

The other pole is occupied by the seller's resistance: "I'm not going to undersell", answered with "and I'm not going to overpay either". It is the portrait of a frozen market, where buyer and seller stare each other down without blinking. The phrase is not dead: it is on forced leave.

"It'll happen in October" and faith in the calendar

There was a time when everything was going to happen in October. "It'll happen in October" worked as a secular prophecy: if it didn't happen this year, it would the next. The saying coexisted with "there are lights on at this hour in the Banco de España's offices" (Spain's central bank), hinting at nocturnal moves by the monetary authority. Neither has withstood contact with reality, but both explain a way of waiting for disaster with the patience of a monk.

Alongside it grew the "lonchafinista church of the clenched fist", a brotherhood of extreme thrift that preached cutting the York ham into transparent slices. Its modern version is the "eurist cent", first cousin of "yogurt-lid saving", which consists of eating for free at store openings.

"Tochovista is my shepherd" and politics as resignation

Politics left behind its own repertoire. "Tochovista is my shepherd" was for years the most elegant way of saying you expect nothing from anyone anymore. Alongside it, "enjoy what you voted for" and "nobody could have known" summed up the mix of irony and fatalism with which any public decision was brushed off.

The inventory also includes "Pedro Sánchez won't call elections even with hot water", a phrase once used as a bet and now read as a simple description of the landscape. Politics, in this glossary, is not a debate: it is a way of enduring.

"Impregnate the soul with pig fury": language as spectacle

There was a time when verbal creativity was a contact sport. "Impregnate the soul with pig fury" means nothing and means everything: it is proof that a forum can generate its own language. Alongside it, "pelitos a chortinas o sedes en las bombonas" and the mythical "TALUEC" worked as passwords of belonging.

The phrase "there are two kinds of women, acompañante and contract" is quoted here only to note its presence in the inventory, not to endorse it. Glossaries also age badly.

The "BMW roaring on the on-ramps"

The identikit picture of the winner had its own jargon: "every burbujarra has a 30 cm dick, earns 10k net a month, screws chortinas bareback daily and spends his holidays on his llate surrounded by luxury loomis". The parody of the nouveau riche became a subgenre of its own, with the "BMW roaring on the on-ramps" as its soundtrack and the "iron bar in the trunk" as the punchline.

Today that portrait sounds like another era. Not because the nouveaux riches have disappeared, but because the humor that ridiculed them has grown more tired.

Why phrases die

The first reason is wear. A phrase repeated a thousand times stops being funny and becomes noise. The second is the change of cycle: "mad max" and "crédit crunch" made sense when the ground was moving; with no ground moving, they are archaeology.

The third is the most uncomfortable. Many of these expressions were born to point at the neighbor, the one who bought, the one who voted or the one who rented. When the neighbor switches sides, the phrase is left without a target. And without a target, there is no joke.

What remains is "nothing is going to happen and you know it", perhaps the most honest of them all. Will it survive the next cycle, or will it be the first to fall?