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October 01, 2005
What’s the Word I’m Looking For?
The Independent profiles an upcoming book on “words for which there is no equivalent in the English language,” and runs a nice list of some of the more peculiar. Highlights:
Iktsuarpok: Siberian for those people who can’t sit still waiting for a visitor, getting up "to go outside often to see if someone is coming."
Zechpreller: German. “A person who leaves a restaurant without paying.”
Alghunj: Persian. The “feigned anger of a mistress.”
Some of them, sort of like that old notion of Eskimos having a billion words for snow, speak to something in their underlying culture, that they should need a specific word for that. Odd.
(Via Arts&Letters Daily)
posted by Dr. Reo Symes at
06:20 PM
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