The Meaning of Tingo Delights Lovers of Words

Adam Jacot de Boinod has written a book that no lover of words can do without. “What I'm really trying to do is celebrate the joy of foreign words (in a totally unjudgmental [sic] way) and say that while English is a great language, one shouldn't be surprised there are many others having, as they do, words with no English equivalent.” Go out now and buy The Meaning of Tingo: And Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World.

First off, “tingo” itself is a word from Easter Island where the people speak Pascuense. Outside Easter Island, almost no one does, which is a pity because every community has someone who practices tingo. It means “to borrow objects from a friend's house, one by one, until there's nothing left.” Dagwood Bumstead would understand, as would Ned Flanders – as American as can be.

German gets rather high marks for its colorful and piquant words, and despite anything Mark Twain said, the vocabulary does make the language useful. “Kummerspeck” is that weight one gains from stress-related eating, but it translates literally as “grief bacon.” Every husband has offered his wife a present by way of apology, “Drachenfutter” in Hochdeutsche, or “dragon fodder” in English (best not say this too loudly). Yet best of all is “Backpfeifengesicht,” which is what many of the cast of “Saturday Night Live” have -- “a face that cries out for a fist in it.”

The Dutch skip stones across water, but the onomatopoeia of “plimpplampplettere” makes it even more fun to say than to do. In the same vein, a Russian "koshatnik" is a cat thief. Norwegians engage in “dugnad,” a party where the guests help the host with moving, painting or some similar drudgery. Afrikaans has a delightful word from stapler, “pampiervampier”. Yes, a paper vampire. Malay has a term for the gap between teeth “gigi rongak,” while Japanese has a term for a girl who is attractive from behind but not from the front “bakku-shan.”

What does give one pause is the huge number of terms some languages have for items that require but one word in English. Hawaiian, for example, has 108 words for sweet potato (a pre-Captain Cook staple), 65 for fishing nets and 47 for banana (another basic food). But perhaps there are variations and quality differences that mattered to the Hawaiian way of life. Less certain is why Albanian needs 27 different words for mustache. “Madh” is a bushy one, “posht” is one that droops at the ends, and “fshes,” Mr. de Boinod advises, is “a long broom-like moustache with bristly hairs.” One can only hope for a sequel.


© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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