ニュースの英語を解説する" In the News"シリーズ
第一回の本日は"limit"です。
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In the news – limits
In the May 9, 2010 Daily Yomiuri, we had the following headlines:
Govt eyes lower medical fee cap for low-income households
Fund planned to curb spread of Greek crisis
Regulations criticized for hindering stem cell study
(Note. “govt” is an abbreviation for “government” and is used to limit the length of the headline sentence.)
This time, we will look at words related to “limit”.
(c) yuji
｜写真素材 PIXTA
“limit” means “to prevent from going farther”, “a boundary”, “a minimum or maximum value”. For newspapers, writers prefer using short headlines of only a few words each. But sometimes the headline needs to be longer, so the writer wants to reduce the number of letters in the headline. By using “govt” to keep the headline short, the writer is said to “limit” the length of the headline.
A related use of “limit” is when the newspaper editor thinks that certain words are too “strong” in meaning for children to read. So, the editor will “limit the choice of words” to avoid offending the readers of the newspaper.
A cap is type of hat that is worn on your head. It can be used to mean “upper limit”. So, “putting a cap on spending” is the same as saying “set an upper limit on spending”. In the newspaper story mentioned above, the Japanese government is discussing the possibility of a smaller upper limit on medical fees.
Curb can mean “limit”, but it can also mean “prevent”. When we “limit the damage” caused by a disaster, we “prevent the damage from becoming worse”, or we “curb the spread” of the damage. The most common usage of “curb” is the name of the part of the street next to the sidewalk; i.e. – the street curb.
Sometimes, we don’t want to stop something from happening. Such as when a company tries to increase its profits. If a limit does exist, we consider it negatively. That is, the limit “hinders the growth of our profits”. So, hinder is “to set an undesirable limit”. We call that limit a hindrance. Therefore, the headline above describes “Japanese government regulations” as preventing stem cell research in Japan from being more successful.
As you read the English newspapers, try to find more examples of “limits” in the stories.
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※Unfortunately, this story is original to the Daily Yomiuri press, and they chose to print it only in the paper version of their newspaper. It is not available online to non-subscribers.
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