There’s a Word for That

Kummerspeck: a German word for weight that one puts on due to stress eating. Age-otori: a Japanese word for the particular way one sometimes looks worse after a haircut. Shemomedjamo: a Georgian word meaning “to accidentally eat the whole thing.” Tingo: a Rapa Nui word meaning “to eventually steal all of your neighbor’s possessions by borrowing and never returning them.” Aspaldiko: Basque. The joy that comes from catching up with someone you haven’t seen for a long time. Mondegreen: English, coined in the twentieth century to describe the mistaken lyrics one habitually attributes to a misheard song (and which one sometimes prefers to the real lyrics).

Lists like this are easy to find. The internet is full of them because—regardless of their factual accuracy—people love learning that other languages name things that they didn’t know had names, or distinguish things they had never distinguished before, or connect things they never saw as connected. The lists bear witness to the fact that there is a small but profound joy in discovering new words for our experiences. James D. Reich, Boston Review

questo articolo interessante si riferisce al libro pubblicato nel 2022: Words for the Heart: A Treasury of Emotions from Classical India, di Maria Heim (Princeton University Press)