Blocks will not pass!

Traditionally insinuating and creative in attack, Carioquês ​​has always been an inclusive dialect that plays and lets play. It never had one of the most solid defenses and any linguistic novelty that arrives in the city tends to walk loose, without marking.

But the internet’s free territory anticipates some of the effects of the Rio-São Paulo conurbation with which futurists threaten us. When no one was looking, the ballad dribbled around night and, now, even the rolê, as a thing that lashes out at the position occupied by the parade, a generic noun that is one of the central pillars of the carioca language.

And, this time, the term used in Dutra’s ugly point for, in the definition of Nei Lopes and Luiz Antonio Simas in the Dictionary of the Social History of Samba, “an indistinct group of people who during Carnival parade through the streets in a relaxed way, with pretensions more Dionysian than Apollonian, less spectacle and more revelry” was not created.

Because this time the goalkeeper was on the ball and made a great defense of the last citadel of the language spoken in Mui Leal e Heroica São Sebastião in Rio de Janeiro, the sacrosanct Carnival.

In the first joke that the alien term “bloquinho” rehearsed in Rio de Janeiro, Mayor Dudu Paes (PSD) refuted it in the city’s official channels, perhaps with some excess of passion. The defense was important, I wasn’t just playing for the crowd.

The profane parties of religious origin that are at the root of the three days of institutionalized madness in Rio evoke fabulous debauchery, but, in Rio, Carnival is not a mess. In fact, it is, but behind every orgy there is an unwritten protocol, a liturgy followed by ear, a tenacious respect for tradition and for all who got there first and earned the right to sit at the window.

Notepads can be very useful for light notes, grocery lists and tic-tac-toe games, but they don’t scratch the poetry floor. Therefore, they have no place in our party. No matter the degree of madness, numbness or familiarity, here we never refer to carnival entities by diminutives. No one is enchanted by samba schools, recreational groups or samba songs.

We venerate the Schools, with a capital E, we sing their samba-enredo and we gather en masse in the parades of the carnival blocks.

It doesn’t matter the number of members, from the most egregious block of dirty to the most bombed blocks of fashionable singer, passing through the venerable blocks of rock Boêmios de Irajá, Bafo da Onça and Cacique de Ramos, in Rio there are no blocks, only there are blocks. This is a norm that needs to be respected, even by the people of São Paulo who honor us with their visit during the momesco triduum.

As Bira Presidente said the other day in a review with Cacique’s board under the historic tamarind tree on Rua Uranos, with that laugh of amusing experience, butterfly lightness, original ingenuity and defensive intelligence that, according to Mário de Andrade, only Indians, children and cariocas have it: “Words have power and what is said has to fit with the thing said; I wouldn’t like it if they called Cacique that”. The chat was given, the President knows what he says.