The curious meaning and origin of “mamola”, the word that was popularized forever with Horacio Serpa Uribe

This Saturday at noon, through your son Horacio Jose Serpa, the death of the political leader of the Liberal Party, former senator, former minister and former presidential candidate was known Horacio Serpa Uribe, after struggling with health complications from cancer and other conditions.

Although he was away from political and public life for several years, Serpa was one of the most recognized politicians of the 90s and early 2000s. His particular mustache and his voice in constant vibrato made him recognizable throughout Colombia, campaign after presidential campaign. But if there is one thing that characterized the political leader as his unique hallmark, it was the repeated use of the word ‘mamola’.

How is the history of mamola?

In the mid-1990s, when the scandal of the 8000 process grew, which implicated then-President Ernesto Samper with the entry of drug money, a debate took place in the House of Representatives on the matter. Faced with the request for Samper’s resignation from various sectors, Horacio Serpa managed to say from complete improvisation:

“That doctor Ernesto Samper resign? Chuck! As Jorge Eliécer Gaitán said “

Serpa remembers in his last video interview, for Semana magazine, that the next day He attended the Caracol Radio booth with Darío Arizmedi, and there he asked him again about the topic of ‘mamola’. From that moment the word took on such a force that they came to tell him “Doctor Mamola”. “I almost lost my identity,” he confessed.

History says that Gaitán, the town leader assassinated on April 9, 1948 during the Bogotazo, spoke at the end of his speeches against the Bumango politician Gabriel Turbay. There are records that he used it on April 23, 1947 after achieving the sole leadership of the liberal party. The word was used as a synonym for denial, rejection and impossibility, or that something for no reason should be allowed or accepted. In addition, it was accompanied by the expression “in charge.”

What do linguists say about ‘mamola’?

In its Dictionary of Colombian Political Terminology, a thesis work of the Catholic University of Colombia, it is noted that the origin and meaning of this word has different sources, although most coincide with a gesture of contempt. The oldest in the “Treasury of the Castilian or Spanish Language”, published in 1611 by Sebastián de Covarrubias:

“Vulgarly it is taken for a posture of the five fingers of the hand in the face of the other, and by contempt we usually say that it made him suck.

Then he quotes the Real Academia than in its first dictionary He mentions it, back in 1734:

“chuck. A certain posture of the hand under the beard of another, that regularly runs out of contempt, and maybe for love. Covarrubias calls her a mamona. Phrase that in addition to the straight sense is worth fooling one with feigned caresses, treating them as a fool “, reviews the university.

Years later, it appears in the Larousse dictionary:

“Mamola or mamona. Caress or tease that is done by putting a hand under the other’s beard. Concept possibly with origins from the Hispanic Arabic Mahmula and this from the classical Arabic Mahmulah, something that is suffered by force ”.

And the Royal Academy of the Language, which defines “mamola” in various ways: as a certain way of putting one’s hand under the beard of another as if to caress or make fun of him; as an interjection of mockery or denial (that of Gaitán and Serpa).

On his popular saying, Serpa told a Santander television channel that he did not plan to use that word. “Instead of mamola, we Santander say pistol and we accompany the word with a gesture of the hand. But that’s already rude, “said Serpa, who even recalled in that interview that for many years people when they saw him asked him to say” mamola “, as if it were a circus number.

The study by the Catholic University concludes that ‘mamola’ is “A true political Colombianism. To such an extent that it could be thought that the Royal Spanish Academy could include it in addition to the figures, phrases, interjection character in its use, as a Colombianism ”.