Worldly Words (part 1)

       Within the English language there are countless ways of describing feelings, physical things, moments, concepts, and various situations from real or imaginary – and all usually take quite a collection of words to paint that metaphoric picture. Not so with other languages, in fact the following list of international words will prove that unlike English, highly colorful situations, rich emotional journeys, and oddly humorous “metaphoric pictures” are easily painted by single words. May i present to you a most bodacious and bombastic grouping of weird words that Adam Jacot de Boinod terms “Tojours Tingo”.

        I just consider them the “Jolly Jello” of international alphabet soup; or delightful nonsense. Enjoy!

Sitzpinkler 

(German)

    Slang for “wimp,” literally translated as “a man who sits to pee”.

Koi No Yokan 

(Japanese)

   The sense upon first meeting a person that the two of you are going to fall in love.

Voorpret 

(Dutch)

    The feeling you have just before you are about to do something fun

Backpfeifengesicht

(German)

    A face badly in need of a fist.

Gokotta

(Swedish) 

 “a dawn picnic to hear the first birdsong”

Mokita 

(Papua New Guinea) 

"the truth we all know but agree to not talk about."

    Eomchina 

 As the webstite Lingholic says, “(엄친아) is a hilarious Korean word that is a contraction of the phrase “Mom’s friend’s son” (엄마친구아들). Korean mothers are often very competitive and compare their children against the offspring of their friends. This word is used to describe a person who is more successful or skilled than you – the kind of person your mother would compare you to in a negative light so as to motivate you to study harder.”

    

Apeiron 

(Greek)

 The "limitless, endless, infinite" or, the creation of the cosmos.

 Boketto 

(Japanese) 

“the act of gazing vacantly into the distance.”

    Kummerspeck

(German)

 Excess weight gained from emotional overeating. Literally, “grief bacon.”

Gattara

(Italian) 

 "An old and lonely woman, dedicated to her cats."

Forelsket

 (Norwegian)

"The euphoria you experience when you are first falling in love."

To be Continued. . . .next week with twelve more resplendently weird worldy words.

Giddy with Giggles

Nickelodeon - a nickel show of music or theatrics

Lunch - from luncheon - from nuncheon which means a midday meal or “noon drink”

Book - German for beech since Runes were carved into beechwood slabs

Museum - "a seat or shrine of the Muses"

Glamour - "magical enchantment" . . . and here we have old-school glamour:

Follies - a theatrical revue with lots of pretty girls

Recalcitrant - kicking back!

Reticulate - little net

This is NOT recalcitrant'ing the reticulate . . . but its close:

Axiom - that which is thought worthy

Trance - “fear of coming evil (or, numb with fear)”

Merkabah - wikipedia puts it best: '"chariot" in Hebrew - denotes a type of Jewish mysticism based on Ezekiel's vision of the chariot of fire, i.e., God's throne chariot, a four-wheeled vehicle pulled by four Cherubim, each with four wings and four faces. Note that the Israeli Defense Forces have a main battle tank called the Merkava.'

Access - an attack of fever

Pinocchio - from Italian author Carlo Collodi, probably from Italian pino 'pine' and occhio 'eye'.

Apocalypse: a cataclysmic event which causes “insight, vision; hallucination”

Reishi - from Vietnamese linh chi, literally "spirit mushroom”

Now, a fun string of words that could define a person who imitates a senile fool possessed by spirits.

Giggles - "imitative"

Gaga - "senile, foolish” (but also a Sumerian term for Pluto)

Giddy - old English: meaning “possessed by a spirit”
 

Cum -  from “come” in a sexual way. First used by Bishop Percy in his “Walking in A Meadow Greene”.

Tortoise - Late Latin tartaruchus "of the underworld" or perhaps tortus "twisted," based on the shape of the feet.

Loofah - from Arabic lufah, the plant name from which the sponge grows

Persimmon - Powhatan for any fruit “dried artificially”. Still, i do relish a 3 month old Hoshigaki:

Benedict - newly married man (or, a “blessed bachelor” from Shakespeare’s character of the same name in Much Ado about Nothing; 1599)

SCUBA - acronym for “self-contained underwater breathing apparatus”

Newt - a misdivision of an ewte, from Middle English evete (or “eft”)
    Aristotle, and especially Pliny, are responsible for the fiction of an animal that thrives in and extinguishes fires (a salamander). The eft lives in damp logs and secretes a milky substance when threatened, but there is no obvious natural explanation its connection with the myth.
    Also used 18c. for "a woman who lives chastely in the midst of temptations" (after Addison), and "a soldier who exposes himself to fire in battle." To rub someone a salamander was a 19c. form of German student drinking toast (einem einen salamander reiben).

LASTLY, i present to the world. . . The New Word of the day: 
Shitenfreude - "such extreme laughter from others pain, to point where it make you shit your pants."

Ciao for now, folks!
Keep riding the wave of the winds like little fun-guys. . . as the spirit of ghibli would itself!