Re: Help me understand this phrase, please.

Molly Mockford wrote:
At 16:34:59 on Mon, 10 Oct 2005, Paul Burke <paul@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in <3qvgphFgmpp6U1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

Claudia wrote:

‹She'd have made it so that ne never went into any cemetery again and never heard of or saw a dead person the rest of his life. She'd done plenty of time with the dead, more than enough time to **exempt the people she loved from morbidity**›. Can anybody please explain me the phrase in ** **? What's morbidity, in this case?


Morbidity means fascination with death in this case.


I'm not so sure - I think it just means "death" in this case. It's used in this sense in, for instance, the National Morbidity Statistics - stats on the causes of death. No fascination there.

Thanks Molly, and good morning! (Here in Milan it's 9:04 am)
I don't think that, in this case, morbidity = fascination with death neither. If fact, in anotoher NG, I got this suggestion (which is very close to my first guess). What do you think about it? Here it is:

I'd imagine that she was hoping the people she loved would not have to be as
concerned with death and the dead as she had been forced to be. In other
words, she'd spent so more than her share of time preoccupied with death and
the dead, so she hoped that her loved ones would be spared this burden.

I used the idea of "be spared this burden" in Italian, and got a quite good translation.
=) Thank you very much for you answer and explaination.
Claudia
.

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