Provenance
- Languages
- Spanish → English
- Source
- Reported in medical-interpreting literature and press coverage; this course has not consulted the court record
- Source date
- 1980
- Verification
- secondaryReported by others. This course has not seen the artefact itself.
- Mechanism
- A false friend, in a setting with no interpreter and no time
Input
intoxicado
Mechanism
A false friend, in a setting with no interpreter and no time
Inference
Printed
intoxicado → intoxicated
Observed
A young man was brought unconscious into a Florida hospital in 1980. His family, speaking Spanish, used the word intoxicado.
intoxicado → intoxicated
In the family’s usage the word means poisoned, or made ill by something swallowed. It was taken in its English-looking sense. He was treated for a drug overdose. He had suffered a brain haemorrhage, and by the time it was found he was quadriplegic.
Why it is in this corpus#
Because the mechanism is the plainest in the collection and the outcome is the worst. A false friend is a lookup failure with no table involved: two words that resemble each other across languages and do not mean the same thing.
There was no interpreter. That is the actual mechanism, and it is the same shape as the Swansea sign — a process in which no step required a competent reader.
Why it is secondary, and why that matters here#
The case is widely reported and consistently described, and this course has read the reporting rather than the record. The figure usually attached to the settlement comes from that same secondary reporting.
For a menu, secondary is a note. For this, it is a limit on what anyone in this course is entitled to assert, and week 9’s bench is partly about the difference.