Original in Spanish: Colección de palabras difíciles de traducir
For years I’ve kept an intangible collection of hard-to-translate words. If something has a name, it’s easier to think about it. Besides, I believe what can be named says a lot about a culture, and understanding people makes me quite happy.
For example:
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GOYA (Urdu) is the process of suspending disbelief and immersing yourself in a story as if it were real.
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WABI-SABI (Japanese) the beauty of imperfection.
Well, J. Garcia and a friend of hers have gone a step further. They keep a collection of invented words that refer to concepts still waiting to be christened.
I’ll leak some they’ve posted that I especially liked:
TROPEZUDO: said of the individual who performs an action despite being certain it will go wrong.
PELISOPANCIA: the feeling of displeasure upon finding a hair in your soup, and by extension in any cooked food.
EXABRUTO: an insult so crude it reflects worse on the insulter than on the insulted.
PULPITODONTES and AUSTRALOPITÓLICOS: the former are those who preach, from the pulpit of an apparently sacred temple, certain moral values of prehistoric grade, with catastrophist rhetoric, threatening with the flames of Beelzebub in a tone between menacing and whiny, as if the horsemen of the apocalypse were waiting outside. The latter are those who regularly attend that kind of sermon, believing everything as if they had the shrunken brain of our prehistoric ancestors, and on top of it promoting and spreading those messages to everyone around them.
AMONGABLE: two people mutually renounce what they want out of being too kind and/or friendly, but what they’re actually doing is being daft. For example: Juan and María both feel like going for Chinese food, but each thinks it’s too shabby for the other’s preferences, and they end up dining somewhere more expensive and blander because both were very amongable and neither proposed what they actually wanted.
EPISTOBREO: the complaint letter, whatsapp or email you draft in a moment of rage, vomiting all your bile, but which vents you enough that you never need to send it.
DESCULPARSE: blaming your problems on other people.
SINDIOSINCRASIA: lack of personality.
TRISTENTA: being happy and sad at the same time about the same fact.
IMPERACTIVO: said of the person who cannot control their need to tell everyone what to do. Correcting, giving unsolicited advice, or directly issuing orders at the rate of a repeating rifle.
JIFISMIQUIS: a boss incapable of delegating, who wastes everyone’s time with their obsession over the most irrelevant, anecdotal trivialities.
Now my collection of hard-to-translate words has a new language: PENDING.
Can you think of a concept still waiting to be christened? Do you know an invented word I don’t?
Let’s make a PENDING-Spanish dictionary :)
I smell this is going to be a PostGlorioso
Gracias J., Ònira, Fernando, Enrique, Paul, Elia, Pedro, Ane, Ana
Palabros ColecciónIntangibleDePalabrosDifícilesDeTraducir
Related: Goya (urdu), Wabi-sabi, Tropezudo, Pelisopancia, Exabruto, Pulpitodontes y Australopitólicos, Amongable, Epistobreo, Desculparse, Sindiosincrasia, Tristenta, Imperactivo, Jifismiquis
(Facebook, 2019-05-11)