Is being pregnant embarrassing?

When learning Spanish from English (and, I’m sure, other languages), one finds out that many words are cognates, nearly the same (international, internacional), but that there are some “false cognates” that will mess you up (soap, sopa = soup). A famous false cognate is embarrass vs. embarazar, the latter meaning “to get pregnant.” There is a famous story of the Parker Pen company advertising in Spanish that their superior writing utensil wouldn’t leak in your pocket and get you pregnant. For more screwups in the world of translated advertising, check out this link.

But the more interesting question, once the prurient chuckles have died away, is WHY these two words are so similar — they are obviously connected etymologically — and yet have such divergent meanings. Is it, as my exchange student friends in Mexico and I speculated, that it is simply embarrassing to be pregnant? The problem is, that doesn’t explain why the Spanish word isn’t used more broadly to describe embarrassment.

Well, here’s what I’ve found from dictionary.com, including particularly the online etymological dictionary, and from the Real Academia’s dictionary, and from WordReference.com’s hidden but very workable Spanish to Spanish dictionary.

The first definition (historically, I’m sure, since it’s not the most common use) of embarazo in Spanish is “obstacle, impediment,” the second being “state of being pregnant.” The original sense of embarrass in English, up until 1828, was to “perplex, or throw into doubt” which further derives directly from “obstacle” and “to block, to bar.” It’s easy enough to see how we could be embarrassed (modern sense) by someone or something blocking us or perplexing us (original sense). So all that remains is to connect being pregnant with being blocked or obstructed. I don’t want to assume it’s as simple as a baby growing inside you is a rather obvious obstruction.