Greguería

A greguería is a short statement, usually one sentence, in which the author expresses a philosophical, pragmatic, or humorous idea in a witty and original way. A greguería is roughly similar to an aphorism or a one-liner joke in comedy. It is a rhetorical and stylistic device used in Spanish and Latin American literature.

History

Ramón Gómez de la Serna is considered the father of the greguería, which he defined as humor plus metaphor. Gómez de la Serna first used the greguería in about 1910. Jorge Luis Borges attributes the invention of the greguería to Jules Renard and the name greguería to Gómez de la Serna. And this would not be strange, given the elitistic character of Borges, influenced by the Contemporanean British and French cultures. The freshness, freedom and vivid imagination of a flexible and democratic Surrealistic writer, such as Ramón Gómez de la Serna, the Spanish inventor of Greguerías, definitely escapes the intellectual straitjacket of the Protestant European influences patent in Borges work.^{[citation needed]}

Examples

Some examples of greguerías by Ramón Gómez de la Serna, originally in Spanish.

• The couple of eggs we eat look like identical twins, and they're not even third cousins. (El par de huevos que nos tomamos parece que son gemelos, y no son ni primos terceros.)
• The peacock is a retired myth. (El pavo real es un mito jubilado.)
• Doors get angry with the wind. (Las puertas se enfadan con el viento.)

See also

• Aphorism