Tag Archives: indentation

Sangría

I didn’t wake up this morning expecting to write a blog post about sangría. But while preparing a handout with instructions for student compositions, I realized that I didn’t know how to say indentation in Spanish. And when I looked it up in Word Reference (my favorite dictionary resource), to my surprise I learned that the correct Spanish word is sangría.

¿Sangría? As in sangría? This definitely called for some further investigation.

Image result for sangria

Again consulting Word Reference, it turns out that sangría has three basic uses. First, there is the refreshing summer drink made from wine, fruit, and other ingredients. Second, there are a few meanings clearly derived from the word sangre ‘blood’. These include ‘bloodletting’, ‘bleeding’, and ‘phlebotomy’; ‘the inside of the elbow’ (where blood is drawn) — this is an unnamed body part in English, what fun!; and, more figuratively, ‘drain’ or ‘loss-maker’. Third, there is the typographical meaning this post started with: ‘indentation’. Likewise, sangrar means both ‘to bleed’ and ‘to indent’.

Leaving aside the indentation meaning for a moment, the question naturally arises: does the beverage sangría get its name from its red color? While the English-oriented Etymology Online website claims that it does, the higher authority of Joan Corominas dismisses this possibility. He explains that sangría was not used with this meaning in Spanish until 1832, and that

It is unlikely that this is a figurative use of sangría ‘bleeding’, mostly because the English sangaree was already seen in 1736 (and Portuguese sangría, 1813); from English it soon passed to Minorcan in the form sèngri — which proves that the word was not used then in either Castilian or Catalan — and in American Spanish it is relatively unpopular. It probably comes from India, from a word derived from Sanskrit çarkarā ‘sugar’, which became sakkarā in Pali, çakkar in Hindi, and šakr in Urdu (perhaps a feminine sakkarī or *sankarī applied to sugared wine).

Corominas doesn’t address the typographical meaning of sangría, However, it occurred to me that bleed has a typographical meaning in English as well, where (to quote Wikipedia) “bleed is printing that goes beyond the edge of where the sheet will be trimmed. In other words, the bleed is the area to be trimmed off.”

I can easily see the origin of the English meaning, since the ink bleeds, or extends, beyond the intended trimming boundary. The Spanish typographical sangría is more opaque to me, since an indentation is a reduction rather than an extension. Maybe it comes, instead, from the ‘inside of an elbow’ meaning, since an indentation is like the bend of an elbow?