Un dibujo chistoso….

Dialysis

Maybe about once a year I get contacted by a social worker, another physician, or a medical student asking me about how they can obtain "services" for a patient -- and illegal immigrant, of course -- who has a medical problem requiring some sort of long-term therapy.

The two most common situations have been the need for hemodialysis and for solid organ transplantation. These patients are really between a rock and a hard place (o si prefieres castellano: con la espalda contra la pared).

If this theme interests you, please see this excellent article in The New York Times from earlier this year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/health/policy/01grady.html?emc=eta1

Scooby Doo

I was visiting some Mexican friends that have been living here in the States for years; in fact, all their three children were born here. They only speak Spanish in the home, so that the children will be bilingual, but when the kids talk among themselves, they use a mix of English and Spanish.

So while I was there, I overheard them talking about their favorite cartoon – Scooby Doo.

One of them kept referring to "El Desgreñado," and I couldn't figure out what she was talking about.

Then it hit me – Shaggy.

Desgreñado is a word that means muy despeinado, or con el cabello muy desarreglado. Shaggy, in other words.

A chip off the old block...

One linguistic phenomenon that has always interested me is how different languages have formulated “standard” expressions to communicate the same concept.

For example, in English if you want to express how somebody is acting in a disorganized way, instead of saying just that, you might say that the person is “running around like a chicken with their head cut off.” This communicates your thoughts in a very effective and colorful way, even though neither you nor your audience have probably ever actually seen a decapitated chicken.

In reading Los Informantes, by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (an excellent book by an excellent author: http://www.amazon.com/informantes-Spanish-Juan-Gabriel-Vasquez/dp/9587048687/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262108424&sr=1-1) I was reminded of one way that Spanish speakers express that someone is very much like their parents (something akin to the English phrase “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree): “de tal palo, tal astilla.” Literally, “from such a stick (comes) such a splinter.” Palo means stick, rod, pole, etc, and astilla is the word for splinter. Tal is one of those common but hard to define words that you should definitely work into your vocabulary; here, it means “such.”

Accesible or Asequible?

This morning I was reading an article in a Madrid newspaper about the healthcare reform issue here in the United States. The article began by giving a little background on the current problem of access to healthcare among the uninsured.

The specific phrase that caught my eye was “Para la gran mayoría de personas sin seguro médico, atención médica simplemente no es accesible.” What the author was trying -- but fails -- to say is that healthcare for the great majority of people without insurance is not affordable.

Because she used the word “accesible” -- instead of “asequible” -- what the sentence truly says is that healthcare is not physically available (such as in the geographic sense: no doctors for miles, or something like that…).

“Para la gran mayoría de personas sin seguro medico, atención medica simplemente no es asequible” means that atención medica is not affordable, not within reach economically…

“Para la gran mayoría de personas sin seguro médico, atención médica simplemente no es accesible” translates to “for the majority of people without medical insurance, healthcare is simply not available (because there are no doctors for one hundred miles – which indeed might be the case, but not because they lack insurance)

Asequible = affordable (or also obtainable or available, more in the economic sense)

Accesible = reachable, accessible, “handy”

For example, to play with words and say something like, "Here is a Porsche, within my reach but out of reach", you could say "Aca hay un Porsche, accesible para mi (beacuse I'm standing right beside it), pero no es asequible (because it costs to much).

Un problema grave…

I'm sitting in the restaurant of a hotel close to the Lima, Perú airport, near a glass window separating the non-smoking section from the smoking section. A sign on the wall of the smoking section catches my attention, because it contains one of my grammatical pet peeves. The sign reads: Fumar puede causar severos problemas con la salud…".

Anybody but me bothered by that?

The problem here is that a problem can't be severo – only your mom, your dad, your first grade teacher, a law, or a cop enforcing the law can be severo.

If a problem is bad, or serious, it's grave.

The problem here, in other words, is that the English word severe does not translate to severo, but rather in Spanish is grave. The Spanish word severo means "strict." Grave means "severe," or "serious."

So when you have a bad -- or severe -- disease, you have una enfermedad grave. If you have a serious problem, you have un problema grave.

Another error, probably even more egregious (or grave, if you will), is when someone wants to say "serious problem," so they say "un problema serio." The word serio does indeed mean serious, but in the since of "sober," or "not funny."

Mi amigo Mark es muy serio, porque tiene un problema grave: su esposa es un poco severa con el.

Useful Links….

I frequently use the dictionary of the Real Academia Española: http://buscon.rae.es/draeI/

• If your computer has only an American keyboard (i.e. doesn't have keys for things like ñ or á for example), be sure that you have selected "Búsqueda por aproximación" or "Búsqueda sin signos diacríticos"
  

 

An interesting website, with a variety of articles related to the Spanish language is: http://www.elcastellano.org/

• Be sure to take a look at – and sign up for – the "word of the day feature": http://www.elcastellano.org/palabra.html