That is cool stuff!
Never bought the book, but I used to see at Barnes and Noble like 20 years ago, and would flip through it.
One of my favorites:"Obi" a Japanese word for "an imperfection that makes something perfect". Originally applied to art and hand made tea cups, it could be applied to anything. .
The article lists many more that I didn't get into the book that are cool. That Spanish word would be easy to adopt and adapt into English with virtually no change in either spelling or in pronunciation: when the committee all have the same feeling it's a "coNmotion".
Not from that book but from U-Tube: I watch a lot of "LangFocus" videos by that young linguistics guy. I learned that Dutch has a lot "colorful" expressions. For example a person who is to hung up on detail is "an ant f****r". Lol!
You could actually create a rather polite English language version of that. Such a person would be "a formic fornicator"!
Okay. That's only slightly more polite. But still.
Unfortunately you could not just collapse it down to "forMicator" because that word already exists in English. To "formicate" (with an M) means "to shiver all over as if your body were being overrun by ants".
23 Feb 2018, 3:38 pm
