I grew up loving the cartoon Peanuts, and I always could relate to Charlie Brown, especially when he would simply sigh. During my 30 years of teaching, I sighed A LOT — ask any of my former students, and they will tell you that when they heard me sigh, they knew I was annoyed with them. Sighing was my way to release stress and tension without blowing my top — of course, I did that, too, but I tried to keep my temper in check by frequent sighing. Very frequent sighing. Extremely frequent sighing.

Perhaps that is why the Spanish word for “to sigh” was always easy for me to remember. It wasn’t really a word I taught in my classes, but I would come across it in things I read on my own, and once I’d learned the word, it firmly stuck in my mind. So, imagine my surprise when I came across the English cognate of the Spanish word for “to sigh” while reading a poem recently.

Let’s look at the cognate duo.

suspire — simply put, this means “to sigh”

suspirar — the Spanish verb that means “to sigh”

I’ve been reading a collection of poetry by past U.S. Poet Laureates, and in the section devoted to Robert Pinsky, there was his poem titled “The Forgetting.” In it, he uses the phrase “suspiring forward into air.” I quite literally stopped reading when I saw that word, blinked a couple times, and then shook my head in disgust that I hadn’t known this word existed in English prior to reading the poem. My cognate cognizance came in handy once more because I immediately understood the word even though it was the first time seeing it in English.

Looking in my unabridged Merriam-Webster, I also find the noun “suspiration” and the adjective “suspirious.” The noun is “suspiro” in Spanish, and the adjective is “suspirioso.”

These words come from the Latin root word for “to breathe,” spirare, so you can see the connection to “respire” and “respiration,” etc. We tend to use the word “sigh” in English becomes it comes to us from Old English, but now that I know that the word “suspire” exists, I believe I will be using it more often because I still tend to suspire when I’m tense — my suspirations are much more infrequent now that I’m not teaching, but they’re still an obvious sign of me feeling frustrated or annoyed at something.

Adding a bit to the simplified definition of “to sigh,” “to suspire” means to draw a deep or long breath. Doing that is a great way to calm oneself and to get centered when everything around you seems to be going crazy or not your way. Just ask some of the Peanuts gang.

If you’d like to listen to the poet Robert Pinsky read the poem in which he uses the word “suspiring,” here is a link to him doing that: "The Forgetting" by Robert Pinsky

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Until next time.

Tammy Marshall

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