escaping special characters and words

I'm adding some custom SQL qualifiers

- WHERE (sale_status available calc=1)

this fails as the field name has 'calc' in it which I imagine is a reserved word. If I rename the field saleStatusAvailableCalc it works fine.

But I have many huge ipad databases in the wild and can't update the field name just now....

So I'd like to escape it - but WHERE (\"sale_status available calc\"=1) fails with a syntax error

Is it possible to do a normal escape at this point?

thanks

Steven