Media: Las Provincias
Original title: Ser «ácido» es ser agudo o incisivo: expresiones en torno a la acidez
Author: Paloma Chen
Date: 7 August 2026
Being “acidic” means being sharp or incisive: expressions related to acidity
We associate it with intelligence, and it is the opposite of sweetness—understood as softness or a lack of character.
The first definition of “acidic” in the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy is “said of a taste or smell: harsh and penetrating, like that of lemon or vinegar.” Its synonyms include “sour” and “vinegary,” while its antonyms include “sweet.” The fourth definition describes it as “harsh, unpleasant,” the opposite of “kind,” while the fifth is quite similar: “biting,” the opposite of “benevolent.” In Honduras, an acidic person is someone who is an expert or highly knowledgeable about something.
As Harold McGee explains in his book On Food and Cooking, the concentration of protons in a chemical solution is so biologically significant that humans developed a specialised taste sensation to detect it: acidity. The scientific term for the class of compounds that release protons in a solution—acids—derives directly from the Latin word acere, which literally means “to taste sour.”
“While salt preserves, acid breaks things down; it is more corrosive, forceful and aggressive. We associate it with a stronger presence. Moreover, ‘acidic’ and ‘acute’ are etymologically related words. That is why we say a comment is sharp when it is also acidic: we can use either term,” explains María Elena Blay—writer, philologist and language teacher at a secondary school in the Valencian Community—to LAS PROVINCIAS.
Harold McGee notes that “acid” and “acetic” come from the Indo-European root ak-, meaning “sharp” or “pointed.” Other English and Latin words such as edge, acute and acrid derive from the same root. Curiously, “oxygen” also shares this linguistic root, since it was once wrongly believed that this element was essential to the creation of an acid. Meanwhile, the word “vinegar” comes from the French vin aigre (“sour wine”), in which aigre ultimately derives from the Latin acer.
For Blay, “an acidic person is an incisive person, someone who makes acidic remarks.” She cites “the acidic comments found in newspapers,” or Daria, the protagonist of the MTV animated series of the same name, which became popular from the late 1990s to the early 2000s for portraying a cynical, maladjusted and highly intelligent teenager. “Characters like Daria—critical and cutting—are the ones we consider acidic,” she says.
“It is curious that we associate sourness or acidity with intelligence—sharpness, judgement, brilliance and critical thought—and that it is the opposite of sweetness, understood as something soft or even lacking in character or wit.” Yet sour and sweet can also complement each other. In Asian cuisines, suantian—the sweet-and-sour flavour—is a classic combination. Although Blay quotes a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin (“if you have a heart and an intellect, show only one of the two; if you show them together, they will curse you”), as though intelligence and sweetness were necessarily incompatible, perhaps Asian cultures show that both ideas can create a more stimulating third blend.
Literature and acidity
In the Lüshi Chunqiu (The Annals of Lü Buwei), a Chinese encyclopaedic text compiled in the third century BCE, Yi Yin—a legendary chef who later became a politician—is credited with a discourse on balance in combining flavours. In the art of harmonious blending, sweet, sour, bitter, spicy and salty must all be used. When a flavour is sour, it should not be corrosive, just as sweetness should not be cloying.
The Valencian Community has its own literary space linked to sour flavours: Poecítrics is a poetry festival founded in 2023 among citrus trees, as a tribute to the legacy of Vicent Todolí and Francisco Brines. Todolí created the largest private citrus collection—Todolí Citrus Fundació, in Palmera, in La Safor—while Brines turned his garden at Elca, in Oliva, into a space for poetry.
Directed by the Oliva-born poet Àngels Gregori, the festival brings these two perspectives together: it celebrates the beauty of citrus fruit and the power of poetry. “Each year, we invite four poets we admire and ask them to connect their readings with citrus fruit. It is not always easy for a poet to have poems devoted to lemons, but whenever possible we try to ensure that they read texts connected with the place where they are,” Gregori explains.
Sometimes, in addition to reading their own work, the poets read verses by authors they admire that relate to this theme. Here, acidity is less about satire or social criticism than about the beauty of the surroundings and an explosion of flavour. Not all citrus fruits, however, are acidic. Among the collection’s 500 varieties are some that are very bitter and others that are sweet. Citrus acidity depends on the variety, degree of ripeness and types of acids present.
In the case of table lemons—the ones we know best—it is precisely their acidity that we seek to enliven our dishes. Pablo Neruda understood the lemon and its juice as a true explosion of light and flavour. In his Ode to the Lemon, he wrote: “the deepest liquor / of nature, / untransferable, alive, / irreducible, / was born from the freshness / of the lemon, / from its fragrant home, / from its acidic, secret symmetry.”
For Miguel Hernández, by contrast, the bitter lemon—not the acidic, fresh one—is a symbol of pain and sorrow: “You threw a lemon at me, so bitter, / with a hand so warm and pure, / that it did not diminish its architecture, / and yet I tasted its bitterness.”
