education

memorize the location of heart and liver before you proceed on this article
which is right and which is left

sakit hati

'sakit hati' is a common phrase among we, Malaysians to express our intense emotional pain. basically, it is a word that represents hate and anger. we will immediately place either our right or left palm on our left upper chest.

we were raised with this toughts..

patah hati = broken heart
baik hati = kind hearted

boy we were fooled by that phrase. hati in english is liver. anatomically, liver is located in the right upper quadrant of the abdominal cavity, resting just below the diaphragm. it is a vital organ that functions to detoxify, synthesize protein, hormones and other necessary biochemicals for digestion.

heart on the other hand is jantung. this organ is located at the left upper chest, the place that we put our palms if we "sakit hati". it pumps blood and when you fall in love and nervous on your first date, you will feel your heart beating faster than the normal rate.

i can see your hands are moving! hahahaha

and since we were toddlers, we drew this shape as hati(liver). structurally, normal heart(jantung) has this shape, not liver (hati). but somehow, in English, we call it as a heart shape. how can we mistranslated it as hati?

The heart shape

should we change those then? then it would be like these..

sakit hati = liver ache
or
heart ache = sakit jantung

err no no. imagine someone says to you "my heart aches". you'd probably think that he got a heart attack or something as he is referring to sakit hati.

or should we place our palms at the right side below the diaphragm everytime we want to say that we "sakit hati"? its just so wrong, isn't it?

hmmm now you are thinking!