Words Placed Precisely in a Mosaic of Meaning
“I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose,—words in their best order; poetry,—the best words in their best order.” — Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A writer who is ambitious with precisely picked words can paint a vivid and startling world in our mind’s eyes. D. H. Lawrence was a painter and a poet, who applied these crafts to his novels. When we walk into his countryside, the flowers we discover there aren’t the obvious “red” — they’re coral, or scarlet, or carmine. Lawrence’s memory contains a catalog of beasts, birds and plants, that he observed carefully around Britain and on his world travels. He grasps and sees each of these beings whole, then shares that firm, clear vision with us readers. Wherever we go in Lawrence’s books, we find creatures and nature apt to the season and locale of his scene. He gets his details right, he makes places real and brings them to life.
We trust an author when they weave a tapestry where every thread is true. We feel a spark, when writers surprise us with words that we know, but rarely use. There is a small challenge and joy of discovery, when we are prodded from our familiar comfort zone, when we must reach for the rarely visited boundaries of our knowledge and understanding.
Some writers reach so far, so often, that it feels like they’re showing off. Though that depends on personal taste, on what your comfort zone is, and how much you enjoy being tested. Personally, I like it when a writer has me reaching for the dictionary every few pages; but if I’m looking up several strange words on every page, I soon stop bothering. I reckon, dear reader, that you enjoy at least a little testing, since you’re reading a diary offering you words you don’t know yet. Well, you may know some of them — but there are 60 obscure words in this diary, and I doubt you already know more than 20 of them.
Art’s Enormous Omnivores
Art is curious, ever-hungry, sampling everything around it, digesting experience into shapes showing fresh beauty and meaning. If your chosen art is carving crucifixes, or growing bonsai trees, you’re only going to capture a fraction of human experience in those limited forms. But other arts are hungrier, with stronger stomachs. These arts try to devour all that we see and hear, feel and know, they try to comprehend all of human experience. Writing aspires this way and, if you add up all the oceans of words written down through history, it achieves it.
Which is moot to us, since none of us can read so much. The Novel, though, often tries to fit a world of dreaming all into one epic tale. Including ur-Novels, The Bible, The Iliad and Odyssey, The Tale of Genji, The Divine Comedy, The Canterbury Tales, Don Quixote, David Copperfield, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, Moby Dick, Middlemarch — each of these crams masses of humanity and wonder, words and play and an exuberance of meaning, into one tome. The novel in flagrante is so shameless that it also devours every form of literature around it. I stopped this parade at 1900, but if you continue further, into modernism and beyond, the novel proceeds to steal from every other art, science and cultural artifact. Sterne and Joyce and their kin would look for everything the novel wasn’t yet saying, then try to include all those lacunae in their ambit.
The Novel is my favorite omnivore. I think Movies and Rock Music are also omnivorous; but those are greater tangents than we have time or desire for. Another enormous omnivore is the English Language. Throughout history, everybody and their mother invaded the British Isles. English drew tens of thousands of words from each of: Germanic languages; French; Latin; and Greek. Around Shakespeare’s time, the British set sail around the world, eventually colonizing a quarter of it. They brought back words from the wind’s twelve quarters, and added them to their native store.
Here are some words that English has absorbed from fifteen other languages. I have seen each of these in books or articles written in English (though Koyaanisqatsi only got there as the name of a movie). I expect you’ll know several of these:
Aloha Lit. the ‘breath of presence’; hello and goodbye, with love and compassion. — Hawaiian (“Lit.” means literally; etymologically from the roots of the word itself)
Coitus Lit. coming, meeting, uniting together; attraction; magnetic force; sexual union. — Latin
Craic Fun, revelry, good times, gossip, news, ‘what’s going on’. — Gaelic
Daimon A divine power that drives/guides human actions; a channelling of divine power. — Greek
Frisson A sudden feeling of thrill, combining fear and excitement. — French
Koyaanisqatsi Nature out of balance; a state of affairs that calls for another way of living. — Hopi
Mitzvah A commandment; a good deed (e.g., performed out of religious duty). — Hebrew
Mojo Lit. witchcraft; a magic charm or spell; sex drive/appeal; personal magnetism or charm. — Creole/Gullah
Namaste I bow to the divine in you. — Hindi
Nirvāṇa Lit. ‘extinguished’ or ‘blown out’ (e.g., as per a flame); release from saṃsāra; ‘ultimate’ happiness, total liberation from suffering. — Sanskrit
Potlatch Lit. to give, or gift; a ceremonial feast in which possessions are given away (e.g., to enhance one's prestige). — Chinook
Ragnarök Lit. fate, judgement (rök) of the Gods (Ragna); ‘twilight of the Gods’; a pivotal event in Norse mythology, involving the fall of many Gods, followed by existential renewal. — Icelandic
Saudade Melancholic longing, nostalgia, dreaming wistfulness; missingness. — Portuguese
Sprezzatura Nonchalance; art and effort concealed beneath a studied carelessness. — Italian
Wanderlust Lit. desire (Lust) to hike (Wander). A longing for travel and adventure. — German
Who would guess, for instance, that so many words which seem thoroughly English have their roots in Arabic – from algebra and algorithm to zenith and zero. Indeed, if we scratch beneath the surface, English is a veritable bricolage of these ‘borrowed’ words.
Such words have long fascinated linguists, who refer to them as loanwords – i.e., words that English has ‘borrowed,’ usually because it lacks its own native term for the phenomena that the word signifies (although there can also be other reasons, like the prestige associated with deploying foreign terminology). Then, with the passage of time, and the legitimacy conferred by widespread usage, such words eventually become assimilated into English (often with a degree of adaptation). However, perhaps even more intriguing is the related phenomenon of so-called ‘untranslatable’ words: essentially, words which also lack an equivalent in English, but haven’t yet been borrowed. Admittedly, untranslatability is a contentious term. On the one hand, it could be argued that no word is actually truly translatable. Words are embedded within complex webs of meanings and traditions. As such, even if languages seem to have roughly equivalent words – amour as the French counterpart to love, for instance – translators have long argued that something precious is always lost in the act of translation. Conversely though, some people submit that nothing is ever genuinely untranslatable. Even if a word lacks an exact equivalent in English, its meaning can usually be conveyed in a few words, or at least a couple of sentences. However, it’s the fact that a word doesn’t appear to have an ‘exact match’ in English that makes it so potentially intriguing (and, in common parlance, renders it ‘untranslatable’). Such words pique our interest, and for good reason. Above all, they appear to indicate the existence of phenomena that have been overlooked or undervalued by English-speaking cultures.
To appreciate this point, let’s consider why we have words. Words carve up the world into digestible pieces, thereby rendering it comprehensible. They then allow us to cognitively engage with these pieces: to create mental representations, and to articulate and discuss them. As such, an ‘untranslatable’ word alerts us to something in the world that English speaking cultures might not have noticed, or not analysed with much detail, but which another culture has picked up on. However, here we see the value of English – indeed all languages – being a melting pot: it is able to embrace and assimilate these untranslatable words (which, in the process, acquire the status of loanwords). In doing so, their meanings may shift slightly, and some nuances might get lost along the way. But without doubt, as English absorbs these words, it unequivocally gets richer and more complex. And our understanding and experience of the world is enriched and deepened accordingly. Think, for instance, of the intellectual leaps that English speaking cultures were able to make upon encountering the Arabic notion of zero.
We who enjoy learning new words — we who are curious about other cultures, and how they see our shared world from a different angle — we are fascinated by the idea of “Untranslatable” words, expressing ideas that don’t quite fit into English. Google “Untranslatable”, and you’ll find many lists of such words. The longest list I found was by Tim Lomas, who wrote the Scientific American article I quote and link to above. He has compiled more than 900 words from 72 languages, gathered in concepts related to wellbeing, at his website, the Positive Lexicography Project. There you can find Lomas’ growing list of untranslatable words, at his Interactive Lexicography (scroll down the left, then click to explore by theme; down the right to explore by language). Here is a pdf of all the words, listed alphabetically; this is actually the most complete list, with more recently acquired words, and including each word’s pronunciation.
I sifted through Lomas’ list, and copied all the words that caught my interest — which turned out to be 184 of them. Then I winnowed them further, down to my 60 favorite words, the ones I found most peculiar or evocative. They make a smörgåsbord of sixty flavors. It heartens me that they tend generally towards wellbeing, and yet cover so many shades of meaning. Here is a BBC article on Lomas’ work, looking further into the emotional content and granularity of his untranslatable words, ’The untranslatable emotions you never knew you had’:
Lomas suspects that familiarising ourselves with the words might actually change the way we feel ourselves, by drawing our attention to fleeting sensations we had long ignored. “In our stream of consciousness – that wash of different sensations, feelings and emotions – there’s so much to process that a lot passes us by,” Lomas says. “The feelings we have learned to recognise and label are the ones we notice – but there’s a lot more that we may not be aware of. And so I think if we are given these new words, they can help us articulate whole areas of experience we’ve only dimly noticed.”
Lisa Feldman Barrett at Northeastern University . . . Her research was inspired by the observation that certain people use different emotion words interchangeably, while others are highly precise in their descriptions. “Some people use words like anxious, afraid, angry, disgusted to refer to a general affective state of feeling bad,” she explains. “For them, they are synonyms, whereas for other people they are distinctive feelings with distinctive actions associated with them.”
This is called “emotion granularity” . . . she has found that this then determines how well we cope with life. If you are better able to pin down whether you are feeling despair or anxiety, for instance, you might be better able to decide how to remedy those feelings: whether to talk to a friend, or watch a funny film. Or being able to identify your hope in the face of disappointment might help you to look for new solutions to your problem. . . . Marc Brackett at Yale University has found that teaching 10 and 11-year-old children a richer emotional vocabulary improved their end-of-year grades, and promoted better behavior in the classroom. “The more granular our experience of emotion is, the more capable we are to make sense of our inner lives,” he says.
Here, for your amusement and edification, are words from twenty languages. One is already English; however, it is a fine sensation, that I have had but never named before. You won’t be able to drop these into your own sentences (unless you digress to explain them), but the small epiphany of seeing these subtleties spelled out may enrich your inner world with a new hue.
Cafuné The act/gesture of tenderly running one’s fingers through a loved one’s hair, or a pet’s fur. — Portuguese
Curglaff The bracing, shocking and/or invigorating feeling of suddenly entering (e.g., diving into) cold water. — Scottish
Èit Placing quartz stones/crystals in streams (e.g., so that they shine/sparkle in the moonlight, thereby attracting salmon). — Gaelic
Estrenar To use or wear something for the first time (and perhaps imbuing the wearer with a sense of confidence). — Spanish
Gadugi Cooperative labour; working together for the common good. — Cherokee
Gemas A feeling of love or affection; the urge to squeeze someone because they are so cute. — Indonesian
Glas Blue and/or green; also white, sparkling, dazzling, pristine, youthful. — Welsh
Grisaille Lit. greyness, or dullness; a monochromatic art technique, involving use of a single colour (especially grey), often to generate a three-dimensional effect. — French
Iktsuarpok Anticipation one feels when waiting for someone, and keeps checking if they're arriving. — Inuit
Jayus A joke that is so unfunny (or told so badly) that you just have to laugh. — Indonesian
Mångata Lit. moon (måne) road/street (gata); the path of glimmering light that moonlight makes on water. — Swedish
Mokita A truth that everone knows but no-one talks about. — Kivila
Naz Assurance, pride, confidence (arising from feeling unconditionally loved). — Urdu
Petrichor From the Greek stems petro (stone/rock) and ichor (fluid; watery discharge); the earthy scent produced when rain falls on dry soil. — English
Santosha Contentment arising from personal interaction, and acceptance of self and other; one of the five niyama (duty/observance) in Hindusim/Buddhism. — Sanskrit
Shemomechama To eat past the point of satiety (e.g., due to enjoyment of the food). — Georgian
Sólarfrí Lit. sun holiday, i.e., when workers are granted unexpected time off to enjoy a particularly sunny/warm day. — Icelandic
Tarab Musically-induced ecstasy or enchantment. — Arabic
Ubuntu Being kind to others on account of one’s common humanity. — Zulu/Xhosa
Wai-wai The sound of children playing. — Japanese
I picked some of these words for the poetry packed in them: Glas, Mångata, Sólarfrí. Some ring so pithily true, I wonder how English ever got by without them: Jayus, Mokita, Wai-wai. Others show me a specific emotion I lacked sight of, they enlighten me with both clarity and hope: Estrenar, Naz, Santosha. Estrenar, perhaps I’d recognize if I clothes shopped more often. A woman I once danced with, bursting with life and color, told me “Life is a gift; wrap yourself splendidly.” Naz, what a sweet insight: that special surety of heart we find, when we know we are standing on a bedrock of love. If only every soul walking this earth had a piece of naz inside them every day. Santosha, some people are blessed with an abundance of this, a grace they carry with them; so that just by sitting beside them, our own worries grow lighter, and we unfold our better selves.
Eskimos Have Sixty Words for Snow
Or maybe they don’t. But this idea kicked off a century of debate, about just how culture, language, cognition and perception are connected and all influence each other.
“The first reference to Inuit having multiple words for snow is in the introduction to Handbook of American Indian languages (1911) by linguist and anthropologist Franz Boas. He says:
“To take again the example of English, we find that the idea of WATER is expressed in a great variety of forms: one term serves to express water as a LIQUID; another one, water in the form of a large expanse (LAKE); others, water as running in a large body or in a small body (RIVER and BROOK); still other terms express water in the form of RAIN, DEW, WAVE, and FOAM. It is perfectly conceivable that this variety of ideas, each of which is expressed by a single independent term in English, might be expressed in other languages by derivations from the same term. Another example of the same kind, the words for SNOW in Eskimo, may be given. Here we find one word, aput, expressing SNOW ON THE GROUND; another one, qana, FALLING SNOW; a third one, piqsirpoq, DRIFTING SNOW; and a fourth one, qimuqsuq, A SNOWDRIFT.”
This meta-debate about how we see and know and describe the world is intriguing, but orthogonal to our path. I’m sure it will come up again in the comments. Without pronouncing upon entire cultures and worldviews, it’s always intriguing to find that another country cultivates an entire field of study, on a subject that our country won’t give a second glance to. Or when we find that another country invents styles and approaches that never occur in our own land. Why did England produce such a rich school of Romantic poets in the early 1800s? Why did France own Impressionism?
Japan has a long and layered history of art, filled with exquisite beauties, that feel alien to our culture, and yet speak to us directly. Lomas’ Interactive Lexicography has a theme these words fit in, Feelings: Complex — AESTHETICS (it’s the eleventh down on the left). A third of the words there come from Japanese. I took ten of those, then added two from other themes, to make this list:
Japanese Aesthetic Words
Fuubutsushi (風物詩) Stimuli/phenomena that evoke/remind one of a particular season.
Goraikou (御来光) Lit. sacred or honorable delivery of light; sunlight seen from a mountain top; the rising sun.
Kanso (簡素) Simple, plain; in art, refers to an elegant simplicity, an attractive absence of clutter.
Kawaakari (かわあかり) Lit. river bright; the glow/gleam of the river at dusk (or in the darkness).
Kintsugi (金継ぎ) Lit. 'golden joinery'; the art of repairing broken pottery using gold; metaphorically meaning to render our flaws and fault-lines beautiful and strong.
Koko (枯高) Combining 枯 (withered, decayed) and 高 (tall, high); weathered beauty; austere sublimity.
Komorebi (木漏れ日) Lit. wood is ‘leaking’ sunlight; dappled sunlight filtering through leaves.
Ohanami (お花見) The culturally valued activity of gathering to appreciate flowers (and specifically cherry blossoms).
Shibumi (渋味) Simple, subtle, unobtrusive and effortless beauty.
Ukiyo (浮世) Lit floating/drifting world; appraising the ephemerality of the world; living within transient moments of fleeting beauty.
Wabi-sabi (侘寂) Imperfect and aged beauty, a ‘dark, desolate sublimity’.
Yūgen (幽玄) Obscurity, cloudy impenetrability, unknowability, mystery.
Are all Japanese people more sensitive to beauty in art and nature? Or did some Westerner believe that, so they hunted for these words to contribute to Lomas’ website? What I find more interesting is, how these Japanese words comprehend beauty in places where Westerners wouldn’t think to look for it.
Kintsugi: As a philosophy, kintsugi can be seen to have similarities to the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, an embracing of the flawed or imperfect. Japanese aesthetics values marks of wear by the use of an object. This can be seen as a rationale for keeping an object around even after it has broken and as a justification of kintsugi itself, highlighting the cracks and repairs as simply an event in the life of an object rather than allowing its service to end at the time of its damage or breakage.
Kintsugi can relate to the Japanese philosophy of "no mind" (無心 mushin), which encompasses the concepts of non-attachment, acceptance of change and fate as aspects of human life.
“Not only is there no attempt to hide the damage, but the repair is literally illuminated . . . a kind of physical expression of the spirit of mushin . . . Mushin is often literally translated as “no mind,” but carries connotations of fully existing within the moment, of non-attachment, of equanimity amid changing conditions. ...The vicissitudes of existence over time, to which all humans are susceptible, could not be clearer than in the breaks, the knocks, and the shattering to which ceramic ware too is subject. This poignancy or aesthetic of existence has been known in Japan as mono no aware, a compassionate sensitivity, or perhaps identification with, [things] outside oneself.” — Christy Bartlett, Flickwerk: The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics
As Leonard Cohen sings in ‘Anthem’, “There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.”
Carl Jung said that where you are deeply wounded, that is where you have the most to give.
I couldn’t swear that they’re right about the beauty in brokenness. But I’m certain this is a far healthier way than staring at the cracks, and losing yourself in the dark regrets they also hold.
Sprachgefühl
The next three words belong in parallel:
Sitzfleisch Lit ‘sitting flesh’; the ability or willingness to persevere through tasks that are hard or boring. — German
Tarjeta To be able to withstand the cold (and function effectively). — Finnish
Weemoet Lit. sadness, woe (wee) courage, daring, mood (moet); having the strength to overcome a feeling of sorrow. — Dutch
Together these illustrate that each have our own demons to contend with. Some of us get cranky when we’re hungry, others when tired, or when they feel disrespected. Many of us feel the undertow of depression, and sometimes yield to it. For those people, weemoet is the exact fortitude they need more of. Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill each had deep, exhausting bouts with depression; but they were also men with characters of oak, who somehow weathered those storms. I believe that in traveling through their long dark nights of the soul, they also learned to take onboard all the pain and peril their countries were wrestling through, and found their way to human solutions that transcended the fog of war. I think that Lincoln and Churchill’s depressions, and the weemoet they found to overcome, enlarged them to grasp solutions that littler men could never have comprehended.
Aiki Blending or harmonising opposing forces within oneself; a dialectical relationship between matched equals; the ability to skilfully manipulate another person. — Japanese
Alcheringa A cultural-religious belief system, spanning all elements of life; referred to as dreamtime or ‘the dreaming’ (occurring ‘everywhen,’ embracing past, present and future). — Arrernte
Ilunga The capacity of being ready to forgive a first time, tolerate a second time, but not a third time. — Tshiluba
Kulturbärare Lit. culture-bearer or culture-carrier; a phenomenon (e.g., person or idea) that upholds a culture and/or moves it forward. — Swedish
Mana whenua The mana held by people who have demonstrated moral authority/guardianship over a piece of land/territory. — Māori
Poldermodel From polder (a piece of land); consensus-based decision making. As a verb (polderen): to solve problems using dialogue. — Dutch
Nemawashi Lit. revolving or going around the roots (e.g., preparing a tree for transplant to different soil); laying the foundations for a proposed project or change; consensus-building. — Japanese
S'apprivoiser Lit, 'to tame'; in the context of a relationship can describe a mutual process of each side learning to trust/accept the other. — French
I gathered these words in my last list because their concepts are more subtle and complex. We started with words for sensations and feelings, we passed through relationships, and now we’re considering character and community. Remember, Lomas set out to gather words concerned with wellbeing.
As I wandered through Lomas’ collection, picking my own choice blooms, I had DKos in the back of my mind: how we argue in this community, who we respect and why, how we come to decisions democratically. I believe Progressives, and Kossacks, and Democrats all need to work out a healthier culture of debate and decision-making, of working together with a common mission, but with room for many individual opinions. I think that most of us want this, but we haven’t built a solid culture around it yet (well, we do pretty well in the R&BLers diaries). If I expound further into politics, this might all turn to pie. Still, these last eight words I picked encourage me, and I’d love to see these concepts growing stronger roots throughout DKos.
Here’s my last word, my favorite of them all, a theme implicit behind this diary. I like how it applies at the basic level of just using language correctly, but also at the Shakespearean level of coining words and spinning vivid and eloquent phrases, to enchant your audience:
Sprachgefühl Lit. ‘language feeling’; an intuitive sense of what is linguistically appropriate; the character of a language. — German
Or, as Webster’s Collegiate says:
1. sensibility to conformity with or divergence from the established usage of a language.
2. a feeling for what is linguistically effective or appropriate.