The Great Word Heist

English has never been an island tongue. From its very beginnings it has happily borrowed or plundered words from strangers and made them its own – whether from the Celtic languages of the Bronze Age, the Latin of the Romans, the Germanic dialects of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, the Old Norse of the Viking raiders, or the flood of Norman French that reshaped the language almost beyond recognition - the list goes on. And on. To borrow from Swedish, English is a veritable smorgasbord – a buffet of what some of us might call ‘picky bits’. There has never been a single course; instead, our language is an accumulation of tastes picked up wherever it has travelled.

Much of this vocabulary fills a gap in our own, offering a concept so specific that English simply has no equivalent, obsolete or otherwise. Take pelinti, a word from the Buli language of Ghana that describes the action of moving hot food around your mouth in a frantic effort to cool it down. English has nothing that captures that specific ‘hashahashah’ dance performed by anyone who has ever bitten too soon into a slice of piping-hot pizza.

The language of Japanese contributes many beauties that come to the English-speaker’s rescue. One of them is age-otori, whose story is a nice illustration of how borrowing sometimes involves a little reinvention. The word in its original sense referred to the process of formally styling one’s hair for a coming-of-age ceremony, only to be horrified by the result. Somewhere along the way the ceremonial meaning fell away, leaving only the general misery of a haircut gone wrong. (While we’re at it, where is the word for thanking your hair stylist for their efforts even as you stare at a horror story in the mirror?).

A common refrain when English feels lacking is of course ‘I bet German has a word for it.’