Suerte: sort/kind/type

Whatever happiness is, I don’t think it’s the same kind of thing as an element, e.g., cobalt.
Sea lo que sea la felicidad, no creo que sea de la misma suerte que un elemento, e.g., el cobalto.

This is the other suerte. Spanish speakers of a certain level are likely familiar with the word “suerte,” which one says when describing the alignment of circumstances in a favorable way for whomever he is ascribing the “suerte” to. You know, luck. It is used in the same way a speaker of British English might use “lot,” as in “he wasn’t happy with his lot.” Sortear, then, is to draw lots or assign lots as if during a lottery.

Less frequently, we come across the usage of suerte in my examples above, which translates quite literally to the noun form of “sort.”

Probably not least because I like philosophy, I often classify things–sort them, in other words. Creating these sets is incredibly important for our understanding of their elements, to the point that the sort or kind that a thing pertains to can change how we study it. For instance, if something is a material, we should study it as a physical object; if it is an archetype of a person or character, we might study it through psychology or critical theory. Etc.

Long story short, I was never confident in the way I would express this sense of “kind” in Spanish. I would usually say “type: tipo,” but I haven’t heard native speakers use “type” in this way or at least not in the contexts in which I would like to use it. It’s not wrong, just never sounded right.

I had heard this usage of suerte maybe a dozen or so times but it took my reading it to understand that it was what I was looking for all this time. Weird how this language learning thing works, no?