I Never Knew There Was a Word for It - Adam Jacot De Boinod [2]
Once again, of course, many of the more unusual words relate closely to the local specifics of their cultures. Most of us are unlikely to need the verb sendula, (from the Mambwe of Zambia) meaning ‘to find accidentally a dead animal in the forest’, which carries with it the secondary meaning ‘and be excited at the thought that a lion or leopard might still be around’. But even if we never have the call to use these expressions, it’s surely enriching to know that in Finnish, poronkusema is ‘the distance equal to how far a reindeer can travel without urinating’; while manantsona, from the Malagasy of Madagascar, is ‘to smell or sniff before entering a house, as a dog does’. We may not share the same climate, but we can all too easily imagine the use of words like hanyauku, (Rukwangali, Namibia) ‘to walk on tiptoe on warm sand’, barbarian-on (Ik, Nilo-Saharan), ‘to sit in a group of people warming up in the morning sun’, or dynke (Norwegian), ‘the act of dunking somebody’s face in snow’.
Half as long again as The Meaning of Tingo, this second bite into the substantial cherry of world languages allowed me to venture in depth into all sorts of new areas. There are more examples of ‘false friends’, from the Czech word host, which confusingly means ‘guest’, to the Estonian sober, a perhaps unlikely word for ‘a male friend’. There are the intriguing meanings of the names of cities and countries, Palindromes and even national anthems, as well as a series of worldwide idioms, which join the words in confirming that the challenges, joys and disappointments of human existence are all too similar around the world. English’s admonitory ‘Don’t count your chickens’, for example, is echoed in most languages, becoming, in Danish: man skal ikke sælge skindet, før bjørnen er skudt ‘one should not sell the fur before the bear has been shot’; in Turkish, dereyi görmeden paçalari sivama, ‘don’t roll up your trouser-legs before you see the stream’ and in the Ndonga language of Namibia ino manga ondjupa ongombe inaayi vala, ‘don’t hang the churning calabash before the cow has calved’.
The Wonder Of Whiffling
While I was working on the previous two books, scouring libraries and second-hand bookshops, riffling through reference books from around the world to find words with unusual and delightful meanings, I kept coming across splendid English dictionaries too. Not just the mighty twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary, but collections covering dialect, slang and subsidiary areas, such as Jamaican or Newfoundland English. Sneaking the occasional glance away from my main task I realized there was a wealth of little-known or forgotten words in our language, from its origins in Anglo-Saxon, through Old and Middle English and Tudor–Stuart, then on to the rural dialects collected so lovingly by Victorian lexicographers, the argot of nineteenth-century criminals, slang from the two world wars, right up to our contemporary world and the jargon that has grown up around such activities as darts, birding and working in an office. Offered the chance, it seemed only right to gather the best examples together and complete my trilogy: bringing, as it were, the original idea home.
Some of our English words mean much the same as they’ve always meant. Others have changed beyond recognition, such as racket, which originally meant the palm of the hand; grape, a hook for gathering fruit; or muddle, to wallow in mud. Then there are those words that have fallen out of use, but would undoubtedly make handy additions to any vocabulary today. Don’t most of us know a blatteroon (1645), a person who will not stop talking, not to mention a shot-clog (1599), a drinking companion only tolerated because he pays for the drinks. And if one day we feel mumpish (1721), sullenly angry, shouldn’t we seek the company of a grinagog (1565), one who is always grinning?
The dialects of Britain provide a wealth of coinages.