English words that pack lots of meaning but other languages don't have a word for it?

[jerez]

@Northern_Piper

When I was studying at Université Laval, in Quebec City, which is very francophone, there were posters throughout the athletic facilities with a mascot, a big goofy dog playing hockey, whose name was “Monsieur Fair-play.” The posters were all about fair conduct, keeping the facilities clean, no dirty hits, and so on. Seemed odd to me, since Laval was a francophone university in a francophone town.

One day when we were putting on our skates, I asked a québécois buddy why the mascot was called “Fair-Play”?

He replied that he couldn’t think of a French word that had the same connotations.

Nice anecdote (I’ll bet the dog had a bandana around its neck), but my first look at an online translation shows something like “sporting spirit” in French. I don’t speak the language so I can’t really say much. I will point out that the OP mentions “ridiculously specific,” “translate(s) as a phrase” and “would take a sentence or two to explain to a foreigner.” Even if there are no cognates with “fair play,” it’s a well-known concept and I think there are going to be ways to convey the meaning with the target-language equivalents of just a word or three (just(ice), respectful, clean, etc.)

[Quercus]

@lingyi

I nominate sick/sick/sic/[sic]
[sic] = thus Which I just learned is the correct meaning. I always thought it meant verbatim when used in writing.

Just for the record, “sic” is actually Latin, and thus in the opposite category of “Non-English word that English doesn’t have a word for”. As pointed out, it literally means 'thus", and is used when writing a quote to indicate that the mistake was in the original thing being quoted and not introduced by the person quoting it.

[terentii]

My twenty-something daughter surprised me once by asking what “empty nesters” were. I’d’ve thought it was clear from the context in which she heard it (a TV commercial about seniors):

People whose grown children have moved out of the family home.

[Treppenwitz]

This is a kind of “prove me wrong” thread - I mean, I have no way of knowing whether “scare up” has equivalents in other languages. So with that in mind, a few suggestions - feel free to prove me wrong.

Kayfabe
Mulligan
Mondegreen
Chortle
Newfangled
Luddite

(I’m guessing Kayfabe [in pro wrestling, the portrayal of scripted and rehearsed action as the real thing; and by extension, the maintenance of that make-believe world] has the best shot out of these.)

j

[terentii]

@Quercus

Just for the record, “sic” is actually Latin, and thus in the opposite category of “Non-English word that English doesn’t have a word for”. As pointed out, it literally means 'thus", and is used when writing a quote to indicate that the mistake was in the original thing being quoted and not introduced by the person quoting it.

It’s also the origin of the Romance languages’ si. The English equivalent when asked a question like “Do you swim?” might be “Just so.” (Meaning “Yes, I do.”)

As I understand it, its use in French is somewhat different than in Spanish or Italian; i.e., it’s used to answer positively to a negative question: “Don’t you like me?” “Si.” (Meaning “Yes, I *do *like you!”

[terentii]

Another word that comes to mind is “cracking,” as in “Cracking toast, Gromit!” When my ex saw The Wrong Trousers, she didn’t know what the word meant, even though she was quite fluent in British English. Our three-year-old daughter, who was already perfectly bilingual, had to explain it to her. (“Very good!”)

[markn_1]

What language doesn’t have a word for “very good”?

[bordelond]

@terentii

Another word that comes to mind is “cracking,” as in “Cracking toast, Gromit!” When my ex saw The Wrong Trousers, she didn’t know what the word meant, even though she was quite fluent in British English. Our three-year-old daughter, who was already perfectly bilingual, had to explain it to her. (“Very good!”)

Might be regional … but in some varieties of American English, the word “kicking” can be used in the exact same way.

[drad_dog]

Beefsteak. It gets borrowed in other languages.

[eschereal]

“Affect” is a noun (along with the directly related verb) that most English speakers struggle to fully understand. It probably has clearer analogues in other languages, though.

[terentii]

@markn_1

What language doesn’t have a word for “very good”?

The question is, “What other language equates ‘cracking’ with ‘very good’?”

[Novelty_Bobble]

@MrAtoz

I saw a clip not too long ago of a stand-up comedian who came from Finland, doing a routine about how the hardest thing about learning English was figuring out the various meanings of the word “ass.”

Consider:

Ass, meaning a donkey
Ass, meaning a person’s buttocks
Ass, meaning an unlikable person
Bad-ass, meaning good
My lazy-ass husband, which means the same as my lazy husband, so the ass is not really necessary at all
Move your ass, meaning hurry up
My ass, meaning that you disagree with an assertion
Half ass, meaning you’re not paying proper attention
Piece of ass, meaning you’re sexy

A bit of Fry and Laurieis required here.

[Chronos]

Quoth terentii:

The question is, “What other language equates ‘cracking’ with ‘very good’?”

That may be the question you were addressing, but it’s not one anyone else in the thread is talking about.

[terentii]

@Chronos

That may be the question you were addressing, but it’s not one anyone else in the thread is talking about.

Au contraire. Read the original post:

**Can you think of any English words that would take a sentence or two to explain to a foreigner? **

I submit that “‘Cracking’ in this sense means ‘very good’!” qualifies as a sentence.

[pulykamell]

@terentii

Au contraire. Read the original post:

**Can you think of any English words that would take a sentence or two to explain to a foreigner? **

I submit that “‘Cracking’ in this sense means ‘very good’!” qualifies as a sentence.

No. “Cracking” is just a simple intensifier. It’s clearly not the kind of word the OP is looking for, unless you could explain that “cracking” is a very particular, nuanced version of “very” that requires more than a one-word entry in a multilingual dictionary.

[eschereal]

“Cracking” is simply vernacular. All languages have vernacular.

[pulykamell]

On the other hand, the Irish/Scots “craic/crack” used in English may qualify.

[Colibri]

@terentii

I submit that “‘Cracking’ in this sense means ‘very good’!” qualifies as a sentence.

That’s not an explanation, but just a two word definition. The OP is clearly intending words that require a more complicated explanation.

[lingyi]

@RickJay

Which “mind?” There are so many.

English is odd not so much in weirdly specific words, but in having a mountain of definitions for the same word. Words like set, run, up, fall, and stand have hundreds of definitions if you get really picky; most English speakers will fully comprehend at least 100, 150 subtle distinctions in the meaning of those words. It is very, very hard for a person learning English as a second language in adulthood to pick those up; you learn most of them as a child.

It it genuinely odd that we use the same sounds and letters to mean so many different things, and we’re totally NOT using any number of perfectly cromulent could-be-words like “gep,” “zimlack” or “jorp.”

Coming up with English’s weirdly specific words is always going to be kind of hard because English is such a thief of a language and so if you come up with weirdly specific words, they’re usually

1. Recent loanwords we stole from another language so it’s kind of cheating to say it’s English,
2. Scientific words, almost invariably thrown together with words that are Latin or Greek or close to it, and
3. Words that aren’t used anymore.

That said, my nomination is “ragamuffin,” a child who is wearing dirty or tattered clothing.

Not as bad a Cantonese, which I love and tried to learn, but when even native speakers say “Why? Are you crazy?” I knew I was beaten. Up to eight (some say as many as sixteen) tones for what sounds like the same word (different characters). I learned the eight tones for fuk 福 (roughly rhymes with look, not that other word <GRIN>), but can’t remember at all how to pronounce it correctly.

[Mijin]

@lingyi

Not as bad a Cantonese, which I love and tried to learn, but when even native speakers say “Why? Are you crazy?” I knew I was beaten. Up to eight (some say as many as sixteen) tones for what sounds like the same word (different characters). I learned the eight tones for fuk 福 (roughly rhymes with look, not that other word <GRIN>), but can’t remember at all how to pronounce it correctly.

Yep.
It’s strange how English-speakers often seem to assume that homophones (different words with the same pronunciation) are something special about English, or that make English uniquely difficult. In fact, homophones are common in most languages, and languages like Mandarin or Cantonese have around 30 times the frequency of homophones as English does (100 times, if we’re not counting tones).

@Colibri

The OP is clearly intending words that require a more complicated explanation.

Agreed. “Cracking” is a terrible example for the purpose of the OP. What language doesn’t have many words that mean something like “very good”?

If the point is that it’s another meaning of the word cracking, so “cracking” is a hard word to translate, I think this is missing the point, because those words are, again, homophones; they are separate words that happen to sound the same.
For example, the phoneme “hai” in Mandarin means lots of things, but are mostly easy to translate to English: “sea”, “still (adverb)”, “evil” etc. It would be very misleading to say that “hai” is a word that English does not have.
If I say I am cracking a whip, there’s no connotation that that’s very good (unless you’re into that), and vice versa. They’re two different words.