wheeze-it

Here's an interesting blog post from Jennifer 8. Lee at the NYT City Room blog. (Aside: I had no idea that the Times had so many blogs. I notice that Judith Warner's blog is only updated once a week. Does that even count as a blog? Isn't that just a web-only column? I'm going to stop asking questions now before I start seriously contemplating the semantics of blogging and slip into a meta-coma.)

The post/web-only article hints at the difficulties of practicing medicine and treating patients in a city whose residents speak dozens of different languages - in this particular case, the problems faced by doctors trying to diagnose asthma in Spanish-speaking patients. She writes: "In interviews with 39 Spanish speakers, 'wheeze' was translated into 12 different Spanish expressions, including 'tight chest,' 'suffocation,' 'asphyxiation,' 'snoring' and 'congested breathing.'" And, as "wheeze" is obviously a rather key term for respiratory diagnosis, a Columbia University Medical Center survey has targeted translation as a major issue in treating the rise in respiratory ailments among the city's Latino population.

Now, it's obvious that it is not the case, as I suspect Ms. Lee well knows, that there is no word in Spanish for "wheeze." But most reporters seem to find the "no word in [pick a language] for [pick a concept that somehow demonstrates the strangeness of said language or culture]" template irresistible - probably because hyperbole makes for a sweet lede. But clearly, Spanish-speakers have been wheezing just as long as English-speakers, and somewhere along the line they've undoubtedly come up with a word or phrase to describe the phenomenon. And the discussion in the comments section certainly bears this out. (As you might expect, the nasty implication that any misdiagnoses are the patients' faults for failing to learn English also rears its ugly little head. Which is so lacking in compassion and basic human decency that I won't even dignify it with a response.)

The problem, as far as I can see, seems not to be that there isn't one word in Spanish for "wheeze," but rather that there are lots of them, and that many medical professionals are not, as it turns out, equipped to deal with the lexical variation - which is no mere fodder for linguistic cocktail-party convo, but rather a serious and pressing public-health issue. And this is why I'm more than happy to forgive Ms. Lee any language-related lily-gilding. Because she certainly manages to make that latter point clear.

By the way, Language Log has a number of posts relating to the "No word for X" syndrome (or snowclone, as regular readers of that site know) that are well worth reading. My favorite is Geoffrey Pullum's "No word for 'lazy hack parroting drivel'?," but you can find a list of a number of others here.