I just finished Cuentos Alegres, a book assigned to me in Spanish class forty years ago. The book itself may be over 100 years old in its original printing.
In the last story, a Sherlock Holmes story, the phrase "murió de un calambre" was used. A literal translation would be "died of a cramp". It's also what Google translate tells me. Does it mean died from a seizure? It this an old usage?
Let's see the definition for calambre as it was a hundred years ago. This is written in the Royal Spanish Academy's dictionary from 1914:
Calambre. (Del ant. nórdico klampi, laña, corchete; en al. krampf, calambre.) m. Contracción espamódica, involuntaria, dolorosa y poco durable de ciertos músculos, particularmente de los de la pantorrilla.
No trace of the electrical shock-related meaning, neither in this dictionary nor in other dictionaries from the same time. That meaning was added to the dictionary in 1992. In fact, a hundred years ago the term to refer to an electrical shoch was descarga eléctrica:
Tona sufrió una sacudida de arriba abajo, como si la hubieran aplicado una descarga eléctrica [...].
José María de Pereda, "Peñas arriba", 1895 (Spain).
In the aforementioned dictionary you can read:
Descarga. Acción y efecto de descargar.
Descargar. 5 Anular la tensión eléctrica de un cuerpo haciendo saltar la chispa o por otro medio.
So it seems that the person died indeed from a cramp. And yes, the word calambre dates from very old, it can be found in the Spanish-Latin dictionary by Antonio de Nebrija, written in 1495.
Reading this text from circa 1535 it seems that people could indeed die from a cramp:
"Pereçosa,
vellaca, puerca, golosa,
mala hembra, desoluta;
di, ¿no acabas, çancajosa?
¡Ven aquí, borracha puta!
Dormillona,
¿de dónde vienes, soplona?
¡Mueras de mala calambre!"Anónimo, "Auto de Clarindo", c1535 (Spain).
The last sentence means "may you die from a bad cramp". By the way, it seems that Spanish calambre and English cramp have the same origin.
Calambre can have many meanings. See the DRAE's entry for "Calambre". One is actually a cramp
- m. Contracción muscular involuntaria, dolorosa y de poca duración.
(same for the third entry, a "espasmo de ciertos grupos de músculos") But it can also be an electric shock
- m. Sacudida producida por una descarga eléctrica de baja intensidad.
It seems difficult, but not impossible, that a person would die from either of these, specially in a work of fiction. Without any context, after hearing
murió de un calambre
I could not tell if it was cramp or an electric shock.
