En busca del genio del idioma: la labor purista de Álex Grijelmo

This paper analyzes Álex Grijelmo’s works on spanish language’s symbolic status and on verbal hygiene. It pays particular attention to his role as a transmitter of the nationalist ideology and its ambiguous relations with the current panhispanic linguistic politics. In order to persuade his readers, Grijelmo becomes both the purist that complaints of linguistic incorrectness, a symptom of moral decadence, and the orwellian intellectual that denounces linguistic misuse by members of social elites to manipulate people. Using Critical Discourse Analysis as a methodological tool, we will analyze Alex Grijelmo’s choice of genres like the essay, where the frontiers between the accuracy of scientific reasoning and the instinctive impression are really fuzzy. We will also pay particular attention to the presence of ideology in the elocutive level of discourse. Particularly, metaphor is used to identify language as a living organism that has to be protected against external diseases. This organism comes alive due to an humboldtian “genius of the language” which is only understood by just a few ones.