The Civil Guard, Spain's gendarmerie, sent a Tweet yesterday evening saying good night to those who follow them on social media. The accompanying image showed a Spanish flag with the words "Buenas noches, España" (Good night, Spain) and a picture of the família Telerín, from a famous Spanish childrens TV show first broadcast in 1964.
Translation: "Night's here and it's time to rest, but always with a smile. Sweet dreams to our million-plus Twitter followers and our hundred-plus thousands Instagranners [sic]"
After the police let a typo slip through in their name for their Instagram followers, a Catalan Twitter user took advantage to bring up both the controversy over language policy in Spain and the police repression of last year's Catalan independence referendum.
"InstagraNNers? I see that monolingualism has negative consequences for some skills. More using spell-check and reading a bit and less hitting peaceful people who wanted to vote on 1st October and throwing urine over peaceful protesters. An embarrassment of a police force."
Given that, the person in charge of the force's official social media accounts didn't hold back and replied in English accompanied by a GIF accusing the Catalan of being a troll.
The Civil Guard's attempted joke by writing in English only came back to bite them as various users picked up on their mistakes, referring back to the original respondent's monolingualism comment.
"I want to hear what they wanted to say with this in Spanish. If you're talking about "conocimiento" it's "knowledge". "Acknowledgement" is reconocimiento. You've not written either of them correctly. Then again the last clause doesn't make much sense anyway. Monolingualism is what you've got."
The user the Civil Guard had alluded to as a troll, clearly amazed by the response, also replied:
When a member of the public criticises you you call them a troll and end of story, right?. What a real shame.
The Spanish police then replied again asking about the Catalan expression au.
Au? What language is that written in???
The user replied that it was written in Catalan on purpose:
Well it's intentionally written in Catalan. I see that you don't understand it. And the word couldn't be simpler, eh. Instead of shouting 'let us act' (when to act = to hit) you can claim that they teach you Catalan and other languages of the state you represent.
A couple of hours later, the Civil Guard replied again, this time with another GIF: