I Never Knew There Was a Word for It - Adam Jacot De Boinod [74]
geitonopoulo/a (Greek) the boy/girl next door
buurvrouw (Dutch) a neighbour’s wife
búa-grettur (Old Icelandic) a quarrel between neighbours
keba (Myanmar) a village reserved for outcasts and beggars
Nesting
If you have space and time, and hopefully some good materials, your best bet is probably to build your own:
u’skwææi (Mingo, USA) a brick (literally, cooked stone)
skvorets (Russian) a person transporting building materials to a dacha in a car (literally, a starling – with reference to nest building)
méygirathu (Tamil) to cover a house with grass, leaves, etc.
maaia (Yamana, Chile) to build wigwams here and there, as a large number of people flocking to a place will do rather than crowd into two or three existing wigwams
Pulling together
Things always work out better if you’ve got people to help you:
akittittuq (Iñupiat, Inuit) a stitch used for sewing a tent made by having one person on the inside while the other is outside (the one on the inside pushes the needle out so that the other person can pull the thread through; the person on the outside then pushes the needle in for the other person to pull); the same stitch is used for sewing a window into place
dugnad (Norwegian) working together in everyone’s interest without getting paid (for example, moving into a house, painting, building a cabin, etc.; also applies to parents coming together to paint a kindergarden, or everyone in an apartment building cleaning inside and outside the house together)
imece (Turkish) a social gathering at which everyone pitches in to help a neighbour undertake a large task
False friends
abort (German) lavatory
bang (Korean) room
dig (Gaelic) ditch
sir (Arabic) crack of the door
gate (Norwegian) street
rub (Croatian) edge
Flagging the beam
In Surinam, when the main roof beam of a new house is in place they have a celebration they call opo-oso, at which a flower or flag is nailed to the end of the beam, some beer is sprayed on the front of the building and then the builders, owner and others have a drink to celebrate.
Dutch decor
The Dutch have two useful expressions: kneuterig describes a particularly bourgeois type of stinginess which someone might display if they spent a fortune buying a new house and then furnished it with the cheapest fittings available, all in the name of saving money; and its opposite een vlag op een modderschuit, excessive decoration of a common thing, or trying to make the ugly beautiful (literally, a flag on a mud barge).
On reflection
Chinese whispers
It is an increasingly common practice to transliterate foreign proper nouns into Chinese characters that sound similar to the original word but give the Western name a highly positive connotation to Chinese ears:
adian Athens proper law
zhili Chile wisdom benefit
deli Delhi virtue hometown
faguo France method country
henghe Ganges everlasting river
haiya The Hague sea tooth
ingguo England country of heroes
lundun London matching honest
meiguo America beautiful country
niuyue New York bond agreement
taiguo Thailand peaceful country
Frog in a well
The Germans have the wonderful word Gemütlichkeit for that particular quality of cosiness you can only ever feel at home. In that always-descriptive language, someone who prefers to stay at home is a Stubenhocker, literally, a room sitter; and in the end, however splendid the house, it’s our intimate individual eyries we actually spend our time in:
pung (Iban, Sarawak and Brunei) to keep to one’s room
sucilwa (Mambwe, Zambia) a man who never leaves his hut (literally, all smoked up)
kúpa-mandúka (Sinhala, Sri Lanka) one who never leaves his home, one ignorant of the world (literally, a frog in a well)
The emperor’s throne
Different cultures have very different approaches to what we euphemistically call the smallest room in the house. The Spanish have excusado, with its polite suggestion of excusing yourself, whereas the German term wo sogar der Kaiser von China allein hingeht literally means