Yow, that’s dodgy.
I wonder if Farsi has a word for pelikanesis, the ability to move seabirds with one’s mind?
There isn’t a word in English to describe the relationship of parents whose kids are married to each other. For example, if my son is married to Sally Smith, and Sally’s father and mother are John and Mary Smith, the most concise way to describe the relationship is to say “John and Mary Smith are my son’s in-laws.”
As I understand it, such a word does exist in some African languages. When you say, “John and Mary Smith are our ________,” people understand that your kid is married to their kid.
Ha! I can’t remember the word - it’s a Danish thing - begins with “H” I think - a sort of moment of gathering together, maybe lighting a candle :smack:
Oh, now I remember, “Spicy Hot” as opposed to “Temperature Hot.”
“The meal is too hot.” (But then we have to go on to say which type of hot we mean.)
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“Bride Price,” being the money a man pays a woman to marry him. This is done in the Arab world. It is the opposite of “dowery.”
There’s no equivalent English translation because the only place a person can feel gezellig is when he or she is actually there in the Netherlands! 
Also it doesn’t count as a word so much as a phrase - Spanish - me gusta (“I like.”) The closest I can think of to translate that would be “… pleases me.” But that doesn’t have the same meaning, really, at all!
Ah, I thought that might’ve been the case, but I wasn’t sure.
If you had a Romance version of my Germanic language game (see post 39), I believe the literal translation of that would be “the ice-cream gusts me”, as opposed to “the ice cream disgusts me.” How gruntling!
The way Australians use “bastard” probably has no direct equivalent elsewhere; uniquely perhaps your best friend is “a complete bastard” whereas your worst enemy is “a bit of a bastard”.
I disagree with “devious” here, as that would only cover one of the many applications of “dodgy”, the used car salesman type. IMO the best translation of “dodgy” is “unreliable”. It covers all those meanings as something or someone can be unreliable for many reasons: dishonesty, mechanical failure, poor quality, and so on.
Sounds gezellig 
Of the two useful chess terms ‘zugswang’ and ‘zweischenzug’, only one is in my UK English dictionary.
Some neat words from Scot Gaelic (from an old dictionary of mine):
and my favorite…
moit: pretended indifference, shyness while speaking about a thing one is very keen for
(I love that last one because I thought I was the only one who felt that way, and here this culture has its own entire word for it)
I found it interesting that Russian has several words, including grust’, pecal’, and toska, that are often translated as “sorrow”, “melancholy”, or “sadness”, but all of them are a little different and none of them equate exactly to their English translations. Grust’ implies something relatively light and temporary, while pecal’ is depper and long-lasting or permanent. *Toska *is sort of a longing for something lost to us, or which never existed at all and never can exist, the absence and inaccessibility of something good, an insatiable heartache. Strangely to an English-speaker, it doesn’t have an entirely negative connotation, either. In Semantics, culture, and cognition: universal human concepts in culture (1992), *toska *is described thusly:
Oh thanks Chez
That covers much of the feeling that inspired the output of the Smiths and other British bands in the 1980s. I think ‘nostalgia’ in its broadest sense (bearing in mind that ‘…algia’ means pain) at least overlaps with this word (as well as the aforementioned Portuguese word ‘suadade’).
Quoting gallowsfodder:
“sgiomalaireachd: mean habits of popping in upon people at meals: living (and doing nothing) about gentlemen’s kitchens”
This is known as “foodfoot” in the West Indies.
Quoth Giles:
Words don’t stand for words; they stand for things or concepts. Sure, there’s no American word that precisely translates the British “biscuit”, but there doesn’t need to be: For any given thing that a Brit would call a biscuit, the Americans have a word for it. If anything, it’s the Brits that are lacking in this comparison, because they don’t have a single word for “small sweet baked good” or for “small salty baked good”, but would instead need to use a phrase like “sweet biscuit”.
No – the words “cookie” and “cracker” have entered British English.
Well, one concept is the particular class denoted by the British English word “biscuit”, in all of and no more than its generality. Giles’ claim is that American English lacks a single word for this particular conceptual category, whatever it is, even if it has single words which refer to every “particular” variety of good which falls under this heading.
I know you are joking here, but I have to admit that reading the post about ‘saudade’ brought the feeling over me. A whistful, longing feeling of wanting to have this word be a word we actually use in English. Particulaly because this time of the year is a time that brings this feeling on for me. Brisk Autumn air and colorful leaves always gives me a ghostly yearning for that feeling I used to get in childhood around Halloween time.
But, anyways, can someone confirm for me that ‘wabi sabi’ is indeed pronounced ‘wobby sobby’. I love the idea of that word, and I always am afraid to use it because I am worried I will pronounce it incorrectly.