The diets are back, the outings to run around the neighborhood, the restless look in the mirror, the surprising shrinkage of the sizes. The time is already in sight when others will judge us with the eye of a scale. The bikini operation is here.
It’s coming. But from where? To find the origin of this locution, it is first necessary to locate oneself in a Pacific atoll called Bikini. The US tested a nuclear bomb there on June 30, 1946, with disastrous environmental consequences. A few days later, on July 5, the dancer Micheline Bernardini presented a revolutionary two-piece women’s swimsuit in a swimming pool in the French capital. And she released to the press: “It will be more explosive than the Bikini bomb.” His designer, Louis Reard, kept the couplet and the idea; and so he called it: bikini. Indeed, it was a real bomb.
The Dictionary it would incorporate the word 37 years later, in 1983, with a preference for the spelling “biquini”. The official sanctimoniousness of the time had banned it, but then it gave in to tourism money and ended up turning a blind eye, as long as a foreigner wore it. That gave the plot for a number of films with astonished Spaniards and stunning Nordics. José Luis López-Vázquez and Gracita Morales shot several of this type, including Operation Mata Hari, Operation Showgirl y secretary operation. And also Bikini goal. Perhaps this film was not titled “Operation Bikini” (which would have completed the tetralogy of operations) because it was already released Operation Bikini (1963), directed by Anthony Carras and which took place on that famous atoll during World War II.
However, popular memory completed the quartet, since bikini goal (1968) came to be remembered as “Operación bikini”, as can be verified, for example, in different biographical news about its director, Mariano Ozores, about Gracita Morales or about López Vázquez. In keeping with that distorted memory, the Madrid venue Siroco undertook in 1999 the long-running summer musical cycle (it lasted until the pandemic) Operación Bikini, an idea by the artist Paco Clavel in memory of those years of beach and fun reflected in the cinema.
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Years later, in 2005, a film called in Spanish was released Operation bikinivery free translation of the original Death to the supermodels, by Joel Silverman, in which some models who arrive at a paradisiacal place (in bikinis, of course) are successively murdered by a mysterious stranger.
From all that, the jump was served: From “I’m going to lose weight to show off the bikini” it was not difficult to get to “I’m in the bikini operation”, using an already extended phrase.
In EL PAÍS it was used in this new sense for the first time in May 2008. In Abc It appeared in July 2007, according to its digital newspaper library.
the fragment bi- bikini (in Marshallese, “place of coconuts”) encouraged the false etymology “two pieces”. And then came the monoquini and the triquini.
Thus we come to the last metamorphosis of the word: the figurative meaning of “biquini operation” has dispensed with the original allocation to the female sex. Just as it is already heard that an employee was caught in his panties by his boss, that a journalist fucked her with cigarette paper and that anyone can make a mess of it, it is now said in masculine: “I am restrained, I am in the operation bikini”. Both of them try to prevent their dives from evoking the primitive idea of the bomb on the Pacific atoll.
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