This is Part 12. Go to Part 1
Eng. expire ~ Sp. expirar
English expire and
Spanish expirar, are also not as good
friends as one might have thought. These words come from Lat. exspīrāre, a verb derived from spīrāre by the addition of the prefix ex‑ ‘out’. Literally it meant ‘to breathe out’, but it also
came to mean figuratively ‘to die’ (as in to give one’s last breath).
In Spanish, expirar
is primarily a fancy and literary synonym of the verb morir ‘to die’, one that is used exclusively with living beings,
typically humans. Although English expire
can also have that meaning in literature, the most common meaning of this verb has
a more figurative meaning yet, since it is primarily used to say that a thing, not
a living being, such as a ticket or a can of soup, cannot or shouldn’t be used because
it is no longer valid, is past its expiration
date. That metaphorical or figurative sense of Eng. expire is not unheard of with the verb expirar in Spanish, though it is secondary and quite rare. We do find
it sometimes in writing, however, to refer to official deadlines in phrases such
as El plazo expira hoy ‘The deadline is today’ (lit. ‘The
period to do something ends today’), typically with the word plazo ‘period, etc.’ or mes ‘month’. In Spanish America, it is
not uncommon to find the word expirar
used formally in writing with some of the same uses as Eng. expire, as in the sentence El mandato
de Cristina Fernandez expira en 2015, found in a Spanish-language
newspaper. (Note that the word mandato
as used here is also probably a calque of Eng. mandate’s meaning ‘a command or an authorization given by a
political electorate to its representative’, AHD).
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Main meaning
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Minor meaning
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Eng.
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expire
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a thing’s usefulness ends
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a person dies
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Sp.
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expirar
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a person dies
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a thing’s usefulness ends
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The figurative sense of English expire (‘come to an end’) is better expressed in Spanish by either vencer, if we’re talking about a contract,
for instance, or, more commonly, caducar,
though neither of these verbs can be used with deadlines or things like the end
of a mandate. For those meanings a simple terminar
‘to end’ is probably preferable, or even the calqued expirar.
The verb caducar is
used for products or documents that have an expiration date (Sp. fecha de caducidad ‘expiration date’).
Thus, we say things like Esta lata de
conserva caduca hoy ‘This tin can expires today’, Mi pasaporte caduca en 2020 ‘My passport expires in 2020’ or Mi licencia
de manejo caducó el mes
pasado ‘My driver’s license expired last month’. The derived adjective caducado/a ‘out of date, no longer valid’
is also used to talk about expiration dates that have already passed, e.g. Esta lata
de sopa está caducada ‘This can of soup is expired’, or
Mi pasaporte está caducado ‘My passport is expired’.
The Spanish verb caducar
was derived, in Spanish, from the adjective caduco/a
that means ‘deciduous’ when speaking of leaves (cf. de hoja caduca ‘deciduous’, cf. also technical Eng. caducous leaves) or ‘outdated’ or ‘decrepit’
in other contexts. This adjective, first attested in the early 15th century, is
a loanword from the Latin adjective cădūcus
(fem. cădūca, neut. cădūcum), meaning ‘that falls or has
fallen, inclined to fall, etc.’. The verb caducar
is already present in the late 15th century in the famous tragic comedy La celestina. The Latin adjective cădūcus is derived from the verb cadĕre ‘to fall’, source of
patrimonial Sp. caer ‘to fall’,
though the derivation is not a regular one.
The French cognate of Sp. caduco/a is masc. caduc
fem. caduque, both pronounced [ka.ˈdyk], which is already
attested in the mid-14th century and, hence, is probably where Spanish got
these words from. On the other hand, there is no French verb *caduquer, which would seem to indicate
that it is a Spanish innovation. English has borrowed the Latin adjective cădūcus as caducous, a technical term used primarily in botany and biology,
which means ‘(of an organ or part) easily detached and shed at an early stage’
(COED).
The intransitive verb vencer
is also used with this meaning in some contexts, primarily when referring to
official deadlines and it is used with the noun plazo ‘period’, as in Mañana
vence el plazo para solicitor las becas ‘Tomorrow is the deadline for
asking for scholarships’. The primary meaning of the verb vencer is ‘to beat; to defeat, conquer, vanquish’. This verb is
used transitively, with a required direct object, though unlike its synonym derrotar ‘defeat’, it can be used with
an ‘understood’ object, e.g. Ayer venció
el Barcelona ‘Yesterday, Barcelona won’ (with an explicit direct object: Ayer venció el Barcelona al Real Madrid ‘Yesterday,
Barcelona beat Real Madrid).
Finally, related to the cognate verbs Eng. expire and Sp. expirar, are the nouns Eng. expiration
and Sp. expiración. Eng. expiration means first of all ‘the act
of coming to a close; termination’ (AHD), as in the expiration of a contract. Sp. expiración does not typically have this meaning, though as in the
case of expirar, it may have started
to be used that way under the influence of English. Sp. expiración refers to
‘the action and effect of expiring’ (DLE) or, more concretely, ‘end of life or
a period of time’, in the latter case typically used with the noun plazo, as in
La expiración del plazo cumple dentro de
tres días ‘The period to act ends in three days’ (Clave). Eng. expiration can also be a technical
medical term that means ‘the act of breathing out; exhalation’ (AHD). This use
of the word corresponds not to Sp. expiración
but, rather, Sp. espiración, an
uncommon word, just like the associated verb espirar (see above). As we saw earlier, Sp. espirar means ‘to breathe out, exhale’ and experts say it is
derived from Lat. spīrāre, with the expected addition of the initial prothetic e‑. The meaning, however, would seem to indicate that the verb espirar could have come from Lat. expīrāre ‘to breathe out’, not spīrāre ‘to breathe’. The sound
adaptation, namely the loss of the [k] sound of expīrāre, is also something to be expected in Spanish a word coming from Latin.
Finally,
just like the verbs Eng. expire and Sp.
expirar can mean ‘to die’, also the
derived nouns Eng. expiration and Sp.
expiración can mean ‘death’, as in
one’s last breath. Not all dictionaries give this as a meaning for Eng. expiration, though one that does say that
the meaning is archaic (AHD). In Spanish, this sense of expiración is not archaic, though it does sound quite formal and
literary.
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