Certainty and doubt

At this level a speaker no longer only says what is the case, but how sure they are of it and where they know it from. The verb to carry away is distar, in distar mucho de estar probado. Spanish has a verb that means being far away: Toledo dista setenta kilómetros de Madrid, and la relación dista mucho de estar probada. English has no such verb at all — the distance sits in an adjective and a preposition, « far from », propped up by « to be ». The difference is small and it changes the shape of the sentence: Spanish puts the gap in the verb, so the reader knows at the second word that something is being held at arm's length, while English has to reach « far » before the sentence tips.