Mbuki-mvuki*
*Bantu word meaning take off your clothes and dance.
As you may have gathered from the total lack of verbosity hereabouts, our current state is one of sleepless frenzy.
Too much work and even more paperwork, and trying to second guess what lurks in the minds of bankers as they sit pink-shirted around their laminated tables to decide our fate; clickety click go the calculators as they grin at the prospect of 15 years of interest only payments.
I take it all much too personally.
The only fun on the work side of things has been a plunge into research on the Ming Dynasty, obese, opium-addicted emperors, over-compensating eunuchs and a rather fascinating Jesuit missionary and scholar by the name of Matteo Ricci who did not manage to convert Emperor Wanli to Christianity, but did get to fix his clocks.
Plus he made beautiful maps, and changed their traditional layout when asked by the Chinese why the heck their rather sizeable country was all squished into a corner like that.
It’s astonishing what some people accomplish in a lifetime (here, I get all smug if I manage to do both laundry and shopping in a single day).
Other than that, in the please help because my brain has reverted to its pre-natal state category:
I’ve received a request from a woman who is publishing a book on words that have no equivalent in English, asking for suggestions. (Once again proving that this is the kind of information I can produce only when it is unsolicited.)
Aside from the popular schadenfreude, gaia, esprit d’escalier, saudade and all those divine Yiddish words, the only ones I’ve come up with so far are:
From the German: Drachenfutter (a peace offering to a wife from a guilty husband) and Gemuetlich (the comfort and ease of a gathering of friends).
From the Japanese: shibui (ageing gracefully) and haragei (communication through body language).
The Dutch word meevaller (when things turn out better than expected) and from New Guinea : mokita (the thing that everybody knows but won’t admit).
Hmm, I just might use this last one next time we’re at the bank, as I fight the urge to utter the word “racketeering.”
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Comment
- But Howard Rheingold already wrote that book.
They Have a Word For It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words & Phrases
— Niel May 20, 11:48am # - How is the quality of these suggestions going to be checked? In the Amazon reviews of the book mentioned above, I see a couple of mistakes. &Deity; knows what the book itself is like.
In any case, I have to show off: in Swedish, there is a cencelt known as fika, which is coffee and pastries/ cake taken with friends at any time and in any place. In fact, if you go to a friend’s house for dinner, you will be given dinner, complete with dessert, and then you will fika (it’s a verb as well as a noun). Very civilised, IMHO.
In Danish, there is a concept of morgenbrød, which is bread that you eat for breakfast. There’s nothing particularly interesting about that, except that in Norwegian, a very closely-related language, the same word is used to denote an early-morning erection.
— Simon May 20, 12:03pm # - Hang in there, Gail. Bankers will forever be bloody, toothy fiends, but you’ll be able to distance yourself before long.
— Tiffany May 20, 9:57pm # - “Drachenfutter” = “dragon feed” (literally!) Heh…
Here’s one: “Tagenbaren”, meaning a native of Bremen whose parents and grandparents were also all born and raised in that city (although it might be used in other parts of Germany as well, for all I know).
Good luck dealing with the bankers – they can’t all be evil, can they?
— Erwin May 21, 12:01am # - “But Howard Rheingold already wrote that book.”
Hey, that’s right. I thought the idea sounded familiar.
“they can’t all be evil, can they?”
Actually, our banker is a very nice fellow, but he’s an underling: the one who walks shaking into the boardroom full of superiors, on our behalf.
The process of attempting to buy a home is most nervewracking, I must say (particularly for a neophyte like me).
— gail May 21, 12:30am # - Tagenbaren… haven’t heard that one in a while.. and i do think it only applies to Bremen.
Morgenbrod…comparable to Abendbrot, meaning dinner in German (but just like an open-sandwich-kind-of-dinner, really).
Schadenfreude could be translated with gloating, but then, it is always a question of context, isn’t it?
Bavarian German has a word for a slice of orange (Schnitz), while high-German speaks only of Stück (a piece). Inter-language lexical gaps… gotta love’em.
good luck with the bank.
— maike May 21, 1:57am # - ‘Fica’ means something entirely different in Italian and won’t sound quite as civilized there. Let’s just say that it’s based on fico, ‘fig’.
If my own experience is any indication, you will suffer mightily through the entire home-buying process and through the first six months of ownership, as you will have no money and lots of things to take care of. Afterwards, domestic satisfaction bordering on euphoria sets in. A year later you find out what some neighbor’s house is selling for, and you will feel permanently relieved of doubt about going through the ordeal.
— Franklin May 21, 9:18am # - Arabic has a fine word, “sahha” (not too sure about that transliteration). It means a cross between congratulations and good luck—it’s said after someone gets their hair cut, makes a major purchase, takes a shower, or other life-changing events. I love the concept of congratulations tempered with caution.
— Robin May 21, 8:13pm # - another word that is impossible to translate in English is ‘Gezellig’. Like the German word “Gemuetlich”, it means something like a comfortable, cozy atmosphere among either close family or friends, or just strangers that one immediately feels at ease with. It can also mean that a place or even an object has a comfortable, cozy ‘feel’.
A word used too often, if you’d ask me. And very bothersome if you live among English speakers like I did a few years ago. I was absolutely unable to find the right translation.
— Anne-Mieke May 22, 6:11am # - In Spanish there is the verb desvelarse, which is when you stay up too late and therefore don’t get enough sleep. They also have the useful enchilarse to describe that unpleasant state when you have eaten too much chile and your eyes and nose are running and you desperately want something cool to drink to quench the fire.
— nina May 22, 11:11am # - “How is the quality of these suggestions going to be checked?”
It’s not. They don’t even check for typos these days; you think they’re going to spend money on checking obscure foreign words? It’s going to be riddled with mistakes and dubious choices, just like the Rheingold (which by its very existence would seem to render this a dubious commercial prospect, but who am I to question the decisions of publishers). I could make up a word in, say, Circassian with a suitably funny/touching meaning, put it in the comments here, it could get picked up by the author and go straight into the book, and none would be the wiser (except me). But it’s just a fun little book, like The Yuppie Handbook. No need to agonize.
— language hat May 23, 10:09am # - Not erudite enough to come up with a new obscure word for you, but in the home owning department, I know my stuff. Shortly after signing the papers to buy my first house in my typical bold and decisive manner, I drove up the driveway, walked into the empty house, and felt suddenly overwhelmed by the immense terror of what I had just done. I burst into wracking sobs.
I lived there for eight happy years and then sold it for more than double what I had paid, despite the fact that I had made no major improvements.
And keep in mind that bankers WANT to loan you money. That’s how they make enough money to take their families on vacation and buy fancier cars than you or I could ever afford. Unless you’re planning to default, it’s YOU who are doing THEM a favor by giving them your business, and much of your hard-earned cash for years to come.
Say, is there some clever word for the reverse intimidation game some businesses play on their clients, where they make you feel lucky that they’ve condescended to wait on you, loan you money with interest, or sell whatever over-priced tchotchkes it is they are hocking?
— susan bein May 23, 11:50am # - Oops. Hawking.
— susan bein May 23, 5:27pm # - My favorite is “binesk” (with, I believe, a diacritical of some sort over the “s”): a Kurdish word meaning “a piece of soap too small to use”.
— Theophylact May 23, 8:12pm # - Thanks for all the swell words, and especially those of support.
I fully expect that, if the loan does go through, I will be gripped by a sudden feeling of utter panic and dread, perhaps not unlike what you might feel waking up in Las Vegas with a throbbing hangover, confetti in your hair and a complete blank as to who is that greasy little one-legged man in a blue tux, in the bed next to you.
(And then having to pay him alimony.)
And… I think “hocking” is the best Freudian slip I ever did see.
— gail May 24, 1:12am # - There’s also the Welsh hiraeth, not exactly homesickness, more of a yearning.
— Daisy May 24, 2:55pm # - Wabi-sabi: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WabiSabi
— Taylor May 24, 9:31pm # - Hiraeth is, if I recall correctly, the yearning for home felt by an exile.
— John Hudson May 24, 9:35pm # - “Shibui” doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with aging. It literally means bitter or astringent, as in the taste of green tea. Something that is shibui is understatedly cool, or perhaps an acquired taste only appreciated by one possessing sufficient sophistication. People who are aging gracefully are often described as shibui because they are have depth and style, not flash.
— Pam May 26, 9:57am # - Courtesy of John Steinbeck in Travels with Charley, there’s the Spanish word vacilar. It means to wander a city looking for something that you don’t particularly care whether or not you find.
Good luck, Gail – we’re doing the same thing, at big-city prices. Assuming it goes through, i will be tempted to paint the walls all kinds of impractical colors, just because i CAN! :)
— Amy May 26, 11:23am # - Not that I’m anyone to talk….but there’s much speculation about the whereabouts of Dean & Oliver these days on the various weblogs I frequent…
Might you elbow him in the ribs….and remind him that he has a reader base?
Good luck on the loan…I’m pulling for you.
— Marshall May 26, 3:17pm # - John, as I understand it, hiraeth can meaning a longing for many things, not just a homeland. I think it can even be used to mean nostalgia for times past, as opposed to place.
— Daisy May 26, 3:57pm # - ... the topic of ricci and the jesuits in china makes me immediately think of jonathan spence’s two superb works “the memory palace of matteo ricci” and “the question of hu”, the latter being a haunting account of a chinese gentleman brought to france in the 18th century by a jesuit. in what must have been a bizarre world full of miscomprehension (on all sides) and wild imagination (also on all sides about all sides), mr. hu ends up in a french mental asylum for a couple of years. oh, and “jonathan spence ricci hu” sounds like the beginning of a promising googlish children’s rhyme tradition.
— katatonik May 29, 6:53pm # - The Ricci story really is fascinating. I’ve read The Memory Palace as well as a couple of books in French and gobs of text off the Web.
Particularly interesting is the different spin each account puts on a set of facts (the script I’m translating makes much of Ricci’s relationship with Li Zhi, and plays up some sexual tension with one of his female disciples – it is the movies after all – two elements which are largely ignored in other accounts), despite consensus on how extraordinary Ricci himself was.
Interesting too is the depiction of ignorance of other cultures, and the wise and not so wise way of going about introducing your own beliefs outside your homeland. A reminder that the other guy always has something to teach us.
— gail May 30, 2:54am # - So here’s my entry for pedant of the year:
There is an English word for Schadenfreude: epicaricacy.
At least there is according to
http://www.kokogiak.com/logolepsy/
And I believe everything I read on the web…
— will May 31, 3:02pm # - You probably know The Deeper Meaning of Liff? Little-used place names are attached to definitions looking for words. The interesting thing is that it has been translated into German, using German place-names. I blogged the details:
http://www.margaret-marks.com/Transblawg/archives/000274.html
— MM Jun 3, 3:27am # - Tell her instead to write a book called “They Don’t Have a Word For It” about perfectly ordinary concepts in English which, it turns out, are not universal.
This idea came to me when I learned that Portuguese allegedly has no word for “frown”.
See my blog entry on the subject .
— Prentiss Riddle Jun 6, 9:33pm # - Chindogu—Japanese for “weird tool,” according to the Chindogu society. But these are tools that are more than weird; they are tools invented to solve problems that don’t exist. If the problem turns out to be a real one, the tool ceases to be a chindogu.
— Rana Jun 16, 6:57pm #
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