Tangent:
Beware the difference in Spanish between
•Tengo calor
•Estoy caliente
The first means that you’re warm, sweating, i.e. I’m hot. Translated word for word: I have heat.
The second also means I’m hot, but with the connotation I’m in heat, i.e. horny.
And a 30 years younger me, an obvious guiri 1, used that to make a double entendre and flirt with las españolas.
1 gringo north of el rio,
Is this real? Was this really such a common occurrence that there was a word for it?
It means “sociable visit” (a business/serious visit would be besoek) - chatting etc is included, but it’s important that it be a visit you travelled for, you can’t really kuier with the people you normally live with.
Currants are either:
The raisins give their name to the other berries.
Nope.
(While what you say may be technically true in a prescriptive sense, it is not the way the word is actually used by actual people.)
I made a whole website with many words on the OP’s subject, it will be closed by the end of the month, but you can still have a look: untrans.eu I lost interest, so I am giving that hobby up.
A few other sites or articles are mentioned in this thread.
Yes - “aunt” and “uncle” often mean “Someone of my parent’s age or older, who is a relative or very close friend” (which is why my first cousins-twice-removed call me Uncle, but I call my mother’s best friend Aunt). On the rare occasions when specificity is needed, English has a way to do that - by doubling the word to indicate that you mean only the most prototypical meaning (and of course, “sibling of parent” is the prototypical meaning of “aunt” or “uncle”).
Yikes! Thanks for the link.
The movement rules of “Chinese checkers” make it a reasonable variant of checkers. It’s the “Chinese” part that’s wrong. The English language’s addiction to adjectives that’s the problem.
An interesting and very entertaining collection of such words:
https://www.amazon.com/They-Have-Word-Lighthearted-Untranslatable/dp/1889330469
I think many of these words or phrases are idioms and slang because they are all peculiar to the language in which they were created because they often have no relation at all to the standard words from which they were created.
For that reason, I always make it a point to speak very literally to people who are new to the English language and still in the process of learning it.
Every chess player worth their salt is familiar with the German(?) concept of zugzwang. On the chess board, it means that any move you can make is a bad one. In life, I suppose it’s kind of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”
Language can have complex subtle meanings:
I am surprised that tsujigiri is primarily literal. I would have thought it was something that maybe used to happen but now was used to describe any time someone does something bad just to try out something new. Instead, it just seems to live on as a thing that happens in video games.
A new article mentioning “pfeilstorchs”.
What do you mean “maybe?” That’s the literal definition of the word and is why other relations take the modifiers of second- or third- or first removed.
My cousins are my aunt’s children. I would never refer to them in any other way.
It’s worth noting that the much broader “kinsman” meaning is very old, as in Shakespeare, for example. The original meaning, or at least the Latin precursor, had even greater specificity though - specifically mother’s sister’s child, not just any aunt…
Then again, I grew up in a culture where older folk of my parent’s generation were all Uncles and Aunties, so a broader usage of cousin is not strange to me. That, plus “cousin” or “cuz” is also used as a slang word for “buddy” in one local dialect (not mine)
Another one from French for which I’ve never found a good English translation :
Empêchement : unexpected event that forces you to cancel or postpone an appointment without necessarily having to specify its nature.
What, you mean a contretemps?
Just kidding, but wouldn’t hold-up or snag be an adequate translation?