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- Cafuné - Brazilian Portuguese – “The act of tenderly running one’s fingers through someone’s hair.”
- Connaître versus savoir: In French, there is distinguished difference between knowledge that results from recognition and knowledge that results from understanding, respectively.
- Dépaysement - French – The feeling that comes from not being in one’s home country.
- Duende - Spanish – While originally used to describe a mythical, spritelike entity that possesses humans and creates the feeling of awe of one’s surroundings in nature, its meaning has transitioned into referring to “the mysterious power that a work of art has to deeply move a person.” There’s actually a nightclub in the town of La Linea de la Concepcion, where I teach, named after this word.
- Esprit d’escalier: The literal translation is staircase wit, but it means to think of a comeback when it’s too late.
- Ilunga - Tshiluba (Southwest Congo) – A word famous for its untranslatability, most professional translators pinpoint it as the stature of a person “who is ready to forgive and forget any first abuse, tolerate it the second time, but never forgive nor tolerate on the third offense.”
- Jayus - Indonesian – “A joke so poorly told and so unfunny that one cannot help but laugh”
- L’appel du vide - French – “The call of the void” is this French expression’s literal translation, but more significantly it’s used to describe the instinctive urge to jump from high places.
- La douleur exquise: The heart-wrenching pain of wanting someone you can’t have
- fernweh - German - a crave for travel; being homesick for a place you've never been.
- saudade - Portuguese - the feeling of longing for something or someone that you love and which is lost.
- Mamihlapinatapei - Yagan (indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego) – “the wordless, yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are both reluctant to start”
- Objet petit a: The unattainable object of desire
- Saudade - Portuguese – One of the most beautiful of all words, translatable or not, this word “refers to the feeling of longing for something or someone that you love and which is lost.” Fado music, a type of mournful singing, relates to saudade.
- Schadenfreude - German – Quite famous for its meaning that somehow other languages neglected to recognize, this refers to the feeling of pleasure derived by seeing another’s misfortune.
- Torschlusspanik - German – Translated literally, this word means “gate-closing panic,” but its contextual meaning refers to “the fear of diminishing opportunities as one ages.”
- Wabi-Sabi - Japanese – Much has been written on this Japanese concept, but in a sentence, one might be able to understand it as “a way of living that focuses on finding beauty within the imperfections of life and accepting peacefully the natural cycle of growth and decay.”
- Ya’aburnee - Arabic – Both morbid and beautiful at once, this incantatory word means “You bury me,” a declaration of one’s hope that they’ll die before another person because of how difficult it would be to live without them.
feb 20 2012 ∞
feb 9 2013 +
feb 9 2013 +