One very interesting word that we have in our unique Venezuelan variety of Spanish is coroto. As the story goes, it came into popular use during one of the many dictatorships we have lived through when the big guy of the time, Antonio Guzmán Blanco, repeatedly asked his servants to be careful with one of his favourite paintings. ¡Cuidado con el Corot! -he said. Be careful with the Corot!
He was referring to the paintings of Camille Corot he had brought back from France upon request of his wife, Ana Teresa Ibarra. The servants, of course, had no clue who Camille Corot was: to their eyes, it was just another toy for the dictator. It could have been a Da Vinci or a Rembrandt, but for them it was just another thing.
As so, the word Corot was absorbed into the popular vocabulary as coroto and means, literally, thing. When Guzmán Blanco referred to the Corot instead of the painting, it was supposed to emphasize its extreme value. When he repeated it so much, it had the opposite effect.
As some sort of collective semantic satiation, repeating a word many times with any purpose will just result in its complete loss of meaning. And I am afraid that one of the words that are a victim of this reality is one that precissely should be treated with extreme care: youth.
As per the Cambridge dictionary, it is “the period of your life when you are young, or the state of being young”. As per our daily use, it is a group, an entity and an abstraction of everything born after ourselves. Youth is something that encompasses so much these days that, in the end, it means nothing.
It is not a period or a state anymore. It is something that decides on wallets, votes and, most importantly, seems to be tasked with changing the world. It ranges from any age to any age and the only criteria for something to be considered youth seems to be being different.
Guzmán Blanco’s Corot was a definite thing until it ceased to be so and became just a coroto, another thing. Youth was a definite thing until it became just an other, somewhere to shift the blame to.
It is clear that youth is a period in life where many special things happen: it is not only our physical peak, but also a moment where we are specially open to new ideas and willing to change. The reason why most of the people who drove the Beatles to stardom were young, and it was not immaturity. It was the bravery to step up and accept that new can also be good.
Yet, this does not mean that we are tasked with changing the world. It is not our sole responsibility.
Even if half of the world’s population is under 30 years old, leaving all of the weight of changing the world over our shoulders is not only unfair, but also illogical. First of all, we are just one half and it so happens that the world belongs, equally, to the two halves.
Although the future “belongs to us” and this might be a common explanation for us being tasked with solving our world’s issues, this is a problem in itself because “the youth” is a mobile concept. According to the OECD, the youth is the segment of the population under 15 years old: in the meanwhile, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification defines it as those people between 15 and 35 years of age.
If we overlap those two definitions, we end up with only 15-year-olds being true youth. In Latin America, we are used to throw big parties to celebrate someone turning 15: should we turn this into a ceremony to invest upon their shoulders the whole weight of being part of the group tasked to change the world for a single year? I don’t think so.
The problem with our current concept of youth is that it is used just as an idea of other, not as an actual term employed to describe anything. I will always defend the idea that youth is a symbol of hope, but I do not think that this can be described in terms of age, population or anything concrete.
If we try to describe it in those terms, we will always find ourselves in the conundrum of trying to find a barrier that cannot be objectively measured. If you asked me some six years ago if an 18-year-old is young, I would have probably frowned. If you ask me now, I would be completely sure of it.
The idea of young changes according to the observer because it is relative. Yet, this is an advantage: relative concepts can become whatever we want if we place them correctly. If we placed Neil Gaiman next to most Wattpad authors, he is definitely not young: if you place him next to Tolkien, he is a blossoming flower. And so it goes.
If you ask me, I will always say that Neil Gaiman is young as much as Corot and the Beatles are because their youth is not associated with age rather than with a certain approach. That is why Rain will always sound strange and The Sandman will always be striking: because they are young in essence.
As long as youth is employed as a term to shift the blame in the other, no one will do anything. It is easier to wait until you turn 35 -or 15- and, then, pass down the responsibility. If we start employing youth as a term to describe a certain essence rather than a segment of population, the reality can be different. For the better.
I agree that youth has to change the world as far as it describes an innovative and open approach towards our issues. In that way, not only people of a certain age would be enabled, as per the term, to change the world.
All of us would. And all of us should.
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