I’ve always imagined ‘the craic’ as a kind of gas-like substance that exists all around Ireland in varying qualities and quantities. In some places the craic is better than in others. In some places there is almost no craic at all. And all you need to do is to start enjoying yourself in Ireland and you tap into it. (My personal definition is contradicted by PookahMacPhellimey’s declension, but feck it, I like the concept.)
Twice in e-mails to German e-friends I’ve mentioned “it really hit the fan today.” They didn’t have a clue what it meant. Also “going postal.”
I wonder if any non-USA person knows that “Nooner” means.
In Brazil you have saudades. This means a kind of homesickness, or longing, but the real meaning can’t be translated to any of the other languages I know (Dutch, German and English). You can feel saudades for a person, a place, or even for a certain way of life.
Why didn’t I preview? I almost always do. :smack:
I had a friend from Uruguay who used an idiomatic phrase that in English is “You want the Potato in the mouth” which had a sense to it that was roughly equivalent to the English phrase “you want to be spoon fed”. But it sounds so much more funny,and often carries the sense better [and seems erudite somehow], to give the Uruguyan idiom in English & I often do.
A woman I knew from Poland found the English word **hub-bub ** meaning roughly “busy excitement & talking noises” to be funny &, apparently, there was no equivalent short Polish word for the concept.
Wasn’t there a whole list of English words borrowed into French that the French Governement treid to discourage use of & promote the use of (often unwieldy) French translations? Words like “Computer” etc.? I may be misrembering that, I can’t find it on google – but I seem to recall a story…
I took a course in college that dealt with the literature of the Islamic world, and the professor had spent a lot of time in the Middle East and Central Asia. I think he’d been in the Peace Corps or something.
We were reading a book translated (I think) from Arabic where two female characters had a lesbian experience. The professor explained to us that the word for male homosexuality in Arabic was lawat, and it referred to the biblical story of Lot, who lived in Sodom and whose wife turned into a pillar of salt. I don’t quite understand the connection, because I never got the impression that Lot was supposed to be gay, but that’s what he told us.
But he also said that there was no word or expression in Arabic that referred to the concept of lesbianism.
Académie Française has a role moderating the French language, which has come to mean protecting it from English influences by choosing French equivalents. Possibly the story you remember followed from when the academy decided “email” was too English and nominated the Québécois word “courriel” in its place.
Not an untranslatable word, but a very useful grammatical structure that dosen’t appear in English - in Japanese, any verb can take the passive voice. So you can have constructions like “I was sat down next to by you-know-who today on the bus”, with the connotation of the (possibly Southern) “I was minding my own business when…” It’s called the “suffering passive” and I quite like it.
Such disrespectful a post! The Chutzpeh!! 
And another Hebrew word I can’t think of an English equivalent for is davka. It basicly connotes contrariness in all its forms. A few examples:
“Why did you do this?” “Davka!” (sort of like “just because”).
“How do you like my new dress?” “Davka quite nice!” (“You were sure I wouldn’t like it, weren’t you?”)
And “Not Davka” is not the same as “Davka not”. It means sort of like “not necessarily”, but, again, with a twist of contrariness and orneriness.
Then again, we Israelis tend to be ornery and contrary anyway…
Dani
They also wanted to replace “Walkman” with “Balladeer”
Actually, it’s more of a verbal sigh after something arduous or something mildly disappointing.
Like: “Uff da, that was a lot of snow to shovel” or “Uff da, Margie, I forgot to put the shaved carrots in the Jell-O”.
stpauler
I dunno. Uff da? Shaved carrots? in the Jell-O? It sounds like a WWII code. 
PookahMacPhellimey Is that like in: Having a gas?
Mycroft Holmes How about ‘heimwee’. Or ‘nostalgia’?
Annie-Xmas Nope, I don’t know what ‘Nooner’ is. Nor am I sure about ‘going postal’ . I do - however - know, what hit the fan.
Noone Special Is ‘Chutzpeh’ a Hebrew, or a Jiddish word? Did you know that the Dutch language uses a lot of Jiddish words? ‘Mokum’, for example, [I believe it’s the Jiddish word for home, or house? ] is used as an alternative name for Amsterdam.
Amsterdammers are Mokummers.
*I love this thread. Did you notice? *
Let’s not forget that great Dutch word…Enne?. (Questionmark inclusive)
The one silly word replaces whole lines of conversation when you meet somebody;
Enne? Ook enne…
With those 3 words everything has been said about ones wellbeing/feelings/etc…let;s get rid of the whole cumbersome “How are you? I’m fine and you?”
Let’s all go;
Enne…ook enne
This is a great thread.
Here is the link for the aboveforementioned book link. Looks very interesting.
The Czech word litost is apparently untranslatable (according to Milan Kundera, and I wonder if our own poster who uses this name got it from Kundera). Anyway, Kundera writes this about the word in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:
I have an old Scot Gaelic-to-English dictionary that I once went through to highlight all the words with the oddest/loveliest meanings. My favorites: moit (" pretended indifference, shyness while speaking about a thing one is very keen for") and atamaich (“to fondle an unreasonable person”).
Exactly! That’s how we used it too in Minnesota/North Dakota. You could use it that way or in a sort of ‘wow’.
Like this with emphasis on the Uff (so I spelled it differently): “Oof da! How the hell did that man lift that car off of that womans leg.”
-K
An Alan Watts book talks about the Japanese word for a feeling - yugen - for which there is no English translation, which we can only understand by opening our minds to situations in which they use the word.
“To watch the sun sink behind a flower-clad hill, to wander on and on in a huge forest without thought of return, to stand upon the shore and gaze after a boat that disappears behind a distant island, to contemplate the flight of wild geese seen and lost among the clouds.” He says, “All of these are ‘yugen’ but what have they in common?”
I don’t know, but it has always intriqued me. Would it be akin to wander-lust, y’all think? He’s right - there is no English translation.
Both, really. While Yiddish is really mostly a Germanic language (in terms of syntax and grammar) it has a large vocabulary of words taken from the Hebrew. One of those words is Chutzpah (notice the slight variation in pronounciation at the end; it’s also pronounced with the emphasis on the last syllable - chutz-PAH). the word then made it’s way into English and other European languages through Yiddish (which is why Yiddish is recognized as its source) - but it’s a perfectly good Hebrew word (and descriptive of far too many Israelis, to boot!)
And also another case of exactly the same process: [Hebrew] Makom (meaning “place”, but also, when used with “the”, “the place of God”, or just “God”) ==> [Yiddish] Mokom ==> Dutch Mokum
… So Amsterdamers are those in the presence of God, huh? Sounds about right, from at least two diverging points of view (that is - one: the Dutch are really, really great people :). Two: it’s all that weed that gets them closer to god ;))
Dani
!!! A favorite term of my Lola’s. Woe befall whatever little kid dares to be too cute around that lady. I was so damn cute it’s a wonder I escaped childhood without any facial scars from her pinches.
Filipino people in general have a lot of really funny words dealing with little kids. ‘Dai’ and ‘Bubuy’ [sp?] spring to mind, terms which me and my other fully-grown half-Flip cousins have apparently yet to outgrow. (It’s also hilarious how it’s perfectly normal for a 42 year old Filipino lawyer to be known as “Pik-pik” or some other similar cutesy repeating nickname by his family)
What’s that Tagalog word that describes the distinct manner in which a Filipino person or family who isn’t particularly rich, but would like to think themselves as such, decorates their house? It’s that wonderfully tacky way that can only really be applied to certain Filipino households. The only way I can draw a parallel to American houses is those people who flank their painfully modest homes with marble lion-holding-a-paw-up statues.
That’s close to saudades but not quite the same thing. Saudades is less melancholy an emotion than ‘nostalgia’ or ‘heimwee’. It also includes a kind of craving, because you can have saudade for a certain kind of food, prepared ‘just right’. When a Brazilian has saudade he has to do something to ‘scratch that itch’, even if it’s just partying with friends.
Babelfish translates it as ‘homesickness’ but that’s not quite right.