Hair on the tongue

 

Those who do not mince their words say what they think, speak supposedly without beating around the bush, say what politeness, perhaps to someone else, would make them keep quiet, and often say the first thing that crosses their mind and their words can hurt. Pelos en la lengua describes the experience of someone who, having agreed to the necessary instrumentalisation of language in order to make himself understood, nevertheless feels the ambiguity of language, as when a fever swells the tongue in the mouth and it seems too big to speak. And, in another order, even worse: it points to a consciousness that knows that between words and things there is an impassable gap, that speaking does not guarantee access to reality, that it is not we who speak, but rather language that speaks to us.