From the Globe & Mail, Canada's national Newspaper, comes a small list that should tickle the fancy of anyone who thinks we English speakers got the world covered with eloquence...
Words that have no equivalent in English:
katah-ara itai (Japanese) - Laughing so hard that one side of your abdomen hurts.
"Oh Jon Stewart-san, stop with your jokes and funny news parody, lest the kata-ara itai I'm feeling right now makes me hurl."
gigi rongak (Malay) - the space between the teeth.
(My mother has quite a pronounced gigi rongak. Seriously.I used to love to stare at it as a child.)
bakku-shan (Japanese) - a girl who appears attractive from behind but not from the front.
Hee hee hee hee No hee hee hee comment hee hee.
kummerspeck (German) - the excess weight gained from emotion-related overeating.
God, first schaedenfreude, now kummerspeck -- German rules.
Drachenfutter (German) - the peace offering made by guilty husbands to their wives.
Oh snap. Fritz, you're killing me here. I want to write a sitcom in German. Right now.
uitwaaien (Dutch) - walking in windy weather just for the fun of it
That's right up there with my favorite Dutch/Afrikaans word: lekker
koshatnik (Russian) - a dealer in stolen cats
(how did the Soviet Union ever fall?)
aviador (Spanish) - A government employee who only shows up on payday.
Whew. And me with only English and my pathetic high-school level French.
I'm depressed now.
3 comments:
bakku-shan (Japanese) - a girl who appears attractive from behind but not from the front.
And all this time I've been describing myself as 'bootylicious' when 'bakku-shan' would've been far more appropriate.
KJC (who enjoys showing off her great ass-ets because that's all she's got)
The combination of 'Uitwaaien' and 'Lekker' is not unheard of. "Lekker uitwaaien" generates some 71600 hits in Google.
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