tingo lingo
A BBC researcher, Adam Jacot de Boinod, sifted through more than 2 million words in 280 dictionaries and 140 websites and found that Albanians have 27 words for moustache, that gin is Phyrgian for drying out, that the Dutch say plimpplamppletteren when they skim stones and that instead of snap, crackle, pop, Rice Krispies in the Netherlands go Knisper!, Knasper! Knusper! English readily absorbs foreign words which may be why we don’t often realise their origins or understand how subtle and evocative other tongues can be.
Italian is particularly rich in words for male vanity and French is excellent on the business of love. The richness of Yiddish for insults seems to be matched only by the many and varied Japanese words for the deep joy evoked by beauty, and the German varieties of sadness and disappointment.
Words for work, money, sex, death and personal habits may well tell you more about national attitudes than anything else. Why would Russian have a special word, koshatnik, for someone who deals in stolen cats and Turkish another, cigerci, for a seller of liver and lungs, or Central American Spanish a particular name, aviador, for a government employee who only comes in on payday?
Old jokes are often the best, and of course many of the most amusing examples for us are words that have rather different meanings than the English: there is fart (Turkish for talking nonsense), buzz (Arabic for nipple), sofa (Icelandic for sleep), shagit (Albanian for crawling on your belly), jam (Mongolian for road), nob (Wolof for love), dad (Albanian for babysitter), loo (Fulani for a storage pot), babe (SisSwati for a government minister), slug (Faulish for servant), flab (Gaelic for mushroom) and moron (Welsh for carrot).
The book is called The Meaning of Tingo and is available from Penguin.
