The Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) was founded in Madrid in 1713, under the reign of Felipe V and on the initiative of Juan Manuel Fernández Pacheco y Zúñiga , inspired by the model of the French Academy and with the purpose, reflected in its first statutes, of working at the service of the Spanish language. Since then, the institution has dedicated itself to preserving —through its activities, works and publications— the proper use and unity of a language in permanent evolution and expansion. Proof of this are the different versions of the Spanish Language Dictionary -before Dictionary of the Spanish language – that have been published throughout these more than three centuries of existence. Logically, not all the new meanings or definitions have been willingly accepted. And I'm not referring to the anger I got when the RAE accepted meatball -more than anything because I spent years correcting my grandmother and telling her that she was a meatball and not meatball , and I could no longer tell her that she, as always, was right-, but to the rebound that a friar caught by the definition of «chaos «, which even went so far as to denounce the RAE before the Court of the Holy Office of the Inquisition.
Today, the first meaning of the term «chaos » in the DRAE is…
Amorphous and indefinite state that is supposed to be prior to the ordering of the cosmos.
In the Dictionary of the Spanish language in 1815…
Disorder that existed before Creation.
On June 17, 1815 Fray Faustino Escuer , from the monastery of San Victorián (Huesca), filed the complaint because before the Creation nothing existed and, therefore, that definition was contrary to Christian dogmas and heretical. The Inquisition, which was already giving its last gasps and will disappear in 1834, admitted the complaint and opened the corresponding process against the Royal Spanish Academy, publisher of the dictionary. In addition to the problem of being involved in trouble with the Inquisition, there was another technical problem:a new edition of the dictionary was being worked on, to be published in 1817, and the letter C was already more than finished. So, Francisco Antonio González , secretary of the Academy, made his corresponding semantic and technical arguments defending the position of the RAE. It must be recognized that the inquisitor fathers were not very angry either, they simply understood that «the word chaos has a confusing explanation, and can be understood in a sense that does not conform to our religion «. So, digging into academics, they came up with their own definition:
The rude and imperfect matter that God created out of nothing at the beginning of time, from which he made and formed corporeal things.
Even though the "penance" was not very burdensome, for the academics it was an intrusion into their field of action and they decided to give the clerical proposal a personal touch. In 1817 the 5th edition of the Dictionary of the Castilian language was published with the following definition of «chaos «:
The state of confusion in which things were at the time of their creation before God placed them in the order they later had.
With God the chaos is over... and the denunciation.