Mz thought about doing this as a Weird Newz report, but wussed out and didn't want to pronounce some of those words...
Dictionary of global linguistic curios brings words for every occasion
Thu Sep 29, 1:21 PM ET
LONDON (AFP) - Ever needed that elusive word to describe a fear of having no beer? Or for a woman who looks pretty from the back but not the front? Help is at hand from a new book rounding up the world's most specialised lexicon.
"The Meaning of Tingo," by British author Adam Jacot de Boinod, is somewhat of a labour of love, resulting from a year of solid trawling through 280 dictionaries and many dozens of Internet sites.
Published this Thursday, the title takes its name from a highly particular word in Pascuense, the language of Easter Island, meaning to borrow objects from a friend's house, one by one, until there is nothing left.
Jacot de Boinod was working as a researcher for a BBC radio quiz when the idea of the book came to him.
"I was glancing through an Albanian-English dictionary, as you do -- or rather as you don't -- and I noticed that there were 27 different words for moustache in Albanian, and 27 words from eyebrows," he told AFP.
"That got me thinking."
The exhaustive research left Jacot de Boinod convinced that "the culture of a country can be best summed up by its untranslatable words".
"The interest comes both in words specific to a particular culture, like all the words for 'banana' in Hawaiianese," he said.
"But you also have words expressing more general feelings which have never made it to other countries."
In the former category, Hawaii reveals its character by having 47 separate words for banana, not to mention 65 for types of fishing nets and 108 to describe the sweet potato.
Among the moustache lexicon in Albania lurks "madh", meaning a bushy variant, "posht" for one hanging down at the ends and "fshes" for a long broom-like moustache with bristly hairs.
The severe winter climate of the Inuit could be perhaps deduced from the word "igunaujannguaq", literally translated as "frozen walrus carcass", a game in which a person tries to stay as stiff as possible while being passed hand-to-hand around a ring of people.
If that sounds rather dour, a more tempting Inuit word might be "areodjarekput", the practice of exchanging wives for a few days to help pass the time in the long winter nights.
Other words are still more obscure, such as "koshatnik", a dealer of stolen cats in Russian.
Similarly, most other languages have survived intact without having to adopt a variant of "fyrassistent", a very specific Danish term for an assistant lighthouse keeper.
Far more user-friendly is "olfrygt", a Danish word whose meaning would be recognised by millions worldwide -- the fear arising from a lack of beer.
And Japanese men have their descriptive vocabularies boosted by "bakku-shan", a woman who looks attractive from the rear but not front on.
German, with its tendency to combine words, proved a fruitful source for Jacot de Boinod's hunt, bringing terms such as "scheissenbedauern", meaning to feel disappointed when something turns out better than you expected.
In the same language, "kummerspeck", or literally "grief bacon", describes the excess weight acquired from emotion-related overeating.
Jacot de Boinod included only words which appeared in official dictionaries, also calling embassies to double-check on the precise meaning of a term.
Some failed to make the cut because their veracity remained in doubt, such as "age-otori", supposedly a Japanese term meaning "to look worse after a haircut".
Jacot de Boinod says writing the book has given him a unique insight into dozens of little-known cultures.
"Reading the dictionaries has taught me so much more about the culture than I would have learned reading a guide book," he said.
