Fifty Words for Snow

I’m a word nerd. I like discovering unexpected connections between words, like how “salary” comes from the same root as “salad” and “sausage” (sal “salt”). I like that some words contain little phrases worn down by time, like “daisy” from “day’s eye” and “goodbye” from “God be with you.” I like that my name, Amanda Knox, can be interpreted to mean something cool and witchy like “beloved of the night” (amare “to love/be loved,” nox “night”), but also “loving knoll” (amando “loving,” knox “small hill”), which sounds less cool and more…cottagecore.

Most of all, I like discovering words that exist in one language but don’t exist in others. These words reveal something about the culture and psychology of the people who invented them, much like a confession. You only bother to name a concept if it has a hold on you, and everyone around you, too. For example, if I had my way, I would have a word for this kind of word. But so far, in English, the closest word we have for these kinds of words is “untranslatable,” which isn’t quite right.

The most famous example of this phenomenon is the claim that the Inuit have fifty different words to describe snow. Which makes sense; they live their entire lives surrounded by snow, so they recognize the nuances of different kinds of snow more acutely than those of us who live in more temperate climates. Just ask any skier; skiing on fresh powder is an entirely different experience than skiing on slush.

The fact that the Inuit universally recognize fifty different kinds of snow in their language reveals their deep connection, one might even say obsession, with frozen water. Except, they don’t have fifty different words to describe snow. This is a myth. Ages ago, somebody noticed that a couple of Arctic languages have a few roots for the word “snow,” and by way of the telephone game, “a few” became “fifty” and “they have fifty different words for snow” became the kind of fact that everyone knows, but which is not actually true.

In fact, we have a word for that: factoid. Although, fun fact: the meaning of factoid has drifted since Norman Mailer originally coined it in 1973. Today, people often use factoid to refer to “a true tidbit.” Thus, factoid means both a fake fact and a real (albeit small) one, depending on who you are talking to. Words!

Every language has examples of “untranslatable” words, and numerous books, articles, and listacles have been made about them. One of my favorites is The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which doesn’t actually catalogue real “untranslatable” words from foreign languages, but invents new “untranslatable” words for English. Words like:

énouement: the bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, finally learning the answers to how things turned out, but being unable to tell your past self.

and:

ghough: a hollow place in your psyche that can never be filled; a bottomless hunger for more food, praise, attention, affection, joy, sex, money, hours of sunshine, years of life; a state of panic that everything good will be taken from you too early, which makes you want to swallow the world before it ends up swallowing you.

Clearly, by its title and these randomly chosen examples, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a kind of confession on the part of its author, John Koenig. He’s obsessed with naming specific, nuanced, and yet universal feelings of existential pain, to the point that he decided to author his own dictionary.

So…what do the “untranslatable” words of other languages reveal about their author’s obsessions?

I’ve intensely studied three languages besides English. Japanese I learned the normal way: in school, with a teacher, memorizing grammar and taking pop quizzes. Japan was also the first place I ever studied abroad, at 14-years-old, living with a host family in the suburbs of Kyoto. German I absorbed through my family. My mother was born in Stuttgart. My Oma spoke in a thick Austrian accent and frequently dressed us up in dirndl. Multiple times a day, my Opa would cry out, “Mensch!” I grew up eating sauerkraut and zwetchgenknödle. Italian I learned…the hard way. As immersion programs go, prison sucks, but you can’t argue with the results of being immersed in a foreign language that you can’t escape.

I’ve noticed some patterns to the kinds of “untranslatable” words that exist in each of these three languages.

Let’s start with Japanese. The Japanese are obsessed with time. Not afraid of it, exactly. They’re more like the person who knows the party is ending and decides the correct move is to pay closer attention, not less.

Japanese has a word, komorebi, for sunlight coming through the leaves of a tree. In English, we call this “sunlight.” We did not think the leaves were load-bearing. But the Japanese did, because in twenty minutes the light will have moved and the whole thing will be over, and they would like it noted, for the record, that it happened.

Japanese has yomigaeru, for a memory coming back to you, which sounds gentle until you find out the literal meaning is “to return from the land of the dead.” So when a song comes on and you’re suddenly fourteen again, it isn’t just a wave of nostalgia; it’s a resurrection. That’s an enormous amount of theological machinery to fire up over the smell of a swimming pool.

Japanese has mono no aware, the tender ache of knowing everything is impermanent, like watching the cherry blossoms fall and loving them more precisely because they’re falling.

Despite first appearances, the Japanese aren’t emo. They are Zen. They decided that the right response to nothing lasting is to notice everything while it’s still here. Paying attention, for the Japanese, is a national hobby and a spiritual philosophy.

Next: German. German is obsessed with the inside of its own head, much the way The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is.

For example: sehnsucht (sehn “yearning,” sucht “sickness”), meaning the intense, wistful yearning or deep emotional longing for something unattainable. Or weltschmerz (welt “world,” schmerz “pain”), meaning the precise ache of noticing the world isn’t as good as the one you picture in your mind.

German has backpfeifengesicht, a face that needs a good slapping. It has kummerspeck, aka. “grief bacon,” the weight you put on from depressed snacking. It has schadenfreude, the feeling of pleasure derived from another’s pain, as well as glücksschmerz, the feeling of pain derived from another’s pleasure.

If I were to play armchair psychologist, I’d say, where the Japanese are hyper aware of impermanence and value presence, Germans are hyper aware that they are psychologically fucked up and value the strict cataloguing of our most base impulses.

Finally: Italian, which is another thing entirely. Italian is derived from Latin. Compared to Japanese and German, it is flowery and musical, even Seussian in its almost incessant rhyming and rhythm. Italian is pretty, almost suspiciously so.

Italian has sprezzatura, the art of making something difficult look effortless by carefully hiding all the effort. It was coined in 1528, in a manual on how to behave at court, which means Italians have been faking-it-until-they’re-making-it for at least five hundred years.

Related, there’s menefreghismo, roughly, “I-don’t-give-a-damn-ism.” It started as the war cry of soldiers who supposedly cared not whether they lived or died, but now is used to wave off insults as well as responsibility, typically embodied by the guy who “doesn’t care” that his phone is at two percent.

As a consequence, Italian has dietrologia, aka. “behind-ology,” the bone-deep belief that the most apparent and obvious explanation is never the real one, because there’s always something hidden behind the version of the story you were handed. It is the dark side of Italy’s deep value of loyalty, community, and bella figura, aka. “beautiful appearance,” the virtue of elegance, dignity, and a good reputation.

Nothing and no one is what they appear to be! All stories are coverups! But you won’t catch any Italian screaming “Conspiracy!” on top of a soapbox, because that would just look ridiculous.

Italians are obsessed with looking good and making it look easy. They are also obsessed with how others are attempting to pull the wool over their eyes. I wish I had known this before I studied abroad.

The only thing unequivocally honest, in Italian, might be the body. Italians practice gestualità, talking with their hands, because, perhaps even more than the words you say, your physicality conveys the true meaning of what you mean. Italian also has, abbiocco, basically, food coma. Sometimes, there is no deeper meaning than you simply have to lie down because of the carbohydrates.

To recap: if there is a confession each language is making through the its own “untranslatable words,” it might be this:

Japanese: The world is ending, so I’ve decided to enjoy it.

German: Dude, I’m seriously fucked up. You, too?

Italian: I don’t believe you, and also, lunch.

Which brings me to my own confession. I’ve been collecting words like these my whole life, and you only collect what you’re afraid of losing. I think what I’m actually after, every time I find a new word, is the proof that someone else got there first. I don’t have the Japanese or German or Italian for it yet, but I’ve spent my whole life looking. How about…kototrostezza: koto “word” + trost “comfort” + -ezza (Italian abstract-noun suffix), aka. “word-comfort-ness,” the relief of discovering that a feeling you thought was uniquely, embarrassingly yours turns out to be so common that some stranger in some other century felt it, too, and hard enough to build a word around it. A word that says: you are not alone.

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