Monday, April 27, 2015

solidario: solidarious

No, this word is not in the Oxford dictionary, but as I recently argued on my other blog, decolonizing solidarity, I think that we should import it into English.  If someone says la huelga fue muy solidaria you could say that it was a a strike with deep solidarity, or strong solidarity - but it's harder to render, say, educación solidaria this way, or comunidad solidaria. Yes, education that embodies solidarity, or a community that shows a lot of solidarity does work - but it would be nice to be able to more quickly call it solidarious.  My sense is that most English speakers will be able to guess at the meaning of this neologism if you use it on the fly when doing simultaneous interpreting.  

Solidario, according to the RAE, means Adherido o asociado a la causa, empresa u opinión de alguien. Empresa?! Leave it to the RAE. I like the Vox definition better: adj. Que muestra solidaridad.

It turns out that the word solidary does technically exist in English, though it is not commonly used. The OED defines it as (adjective (of a group or community) characterized by solidarity or coincidence of interests). Others, like wiktionary, define it simply as having shared interests - which gets to whether you see solidarity as something that can happen across difference or not.  It also seems that solidary is mostly used as legal terminology, as in solidary obligations. At any rate, it was a very solidary strike sounds odd to me and I have my doubts as to how easily understood it would be.  

I like solidarious better than the Sp>Eng options offered by Collins for solidario listed below:

solidario

   
       adj  
1    (=humanitario)   caring  
Luis es muy solidario      Luis is a very caring person  
vivimos en un mundo poco solidario      we live in an uncaring world, we live in a world where it's every man for himself  
un acto solidario      an act of solidarity  
→ solidario con algo/algn        
se ha mostrado muy solidario con nuestra causa      he has been very sympathetic to our cause, he has shown a lot of solidarity with our cause  
hacerse solidario con algo/algn      to declare one's solidarity with sth/sb  
→ solidario de algo      frm   hacerse solidario de una opinión      to echo an opinion  
2      (Jur)   
[compromiso]  
 mutually binding, shared in common   
[participación]  
 joint, common   
[firmante, participante]  
 jointly liable  
responsabilidad solidaria      joint liability