The idea of collecting unusual words from foreign languages
and putting them in a book was that of an old friend from
university, Adam Jacot de Boinod. My involvement began with
a lunch or two chatting about how his book might be structured,
and grew from there. Suffice it to say that every last foreign
word in the book is Adam’s discovery; my contribution
lies in the English links and titles.
Adam has a very beady eye for finding the weirdest and most
wonderful definitions from the huge range of foreign languages
he’s looked at. The first book, The Meaning of Tingo,
contained such great words as termangu-mangu,
the Indonesian for ‘sad and not sure what to do’;
mukamuka, the Japanese for ‘so angry
one feels like throwing up’; nedovtipa,
a Czech word which describes ‘one who finds it difficult
to take a hint’; and ataoso, the Central-American
Spanish for ‘one who sees problems with everything’.
You might have thought that the first book would have exhausted
the stock of wonderful definitions from around the world,
but not a bit of it. On his second trawl through the world’s
languages Adam came back with a huge collection of (often)
even better stuff. And so we discover about okuri-okami,
the Japanese for ‘a man who feigns thoughtfulness by
offering to see a girl home only to molest her once he gets
in the door’ (literally ‘a see-you-home-wolf’)
not to mention the kanjus makkhichus, the
Hindi for ‘a person so miserly that if a fly falls into
his cup of tea he’ll fish it out and suck it dry before
throwing it away’. I’m spoilt for choice for further
examples, but how about digdig, from the
Manobo language of the Philippines, meaning ‘to praise
someone for the quality he lacks in order to encourage him
to develop that quality’ or napleiten
(Dutch) ‘to discuss might-have-beens, go over old ground
again, keep on arguing after a thing has been decided’.
There are plenty more where those came from …
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