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And Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World
Penguin
March 2006
224 pages
ISBN: 1594200866
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
A garden of delights for the word obsessed: a funny,
amazing, and even profound world tour of the best of all
those strange words that don't have a precise English
equivalent, the ones that tell us so much about other
cultures' priorities and preoccupations and expand our minds. Did you know that people in Bolivia have a word that means
"I was rather too drunk last night and it's all their
fault"? That there's no Italian equivalent for the word
"blue"? That the Dutch word for skimming stones is
"plimpplamppletteren"? This delightful book, which draws on
the collective wisdom of more than 254 languages, includes
not only those words for which there is no direct
counterpart in English ("pana po'o" in Hawaiian means to
scratch your head in order to remember something important),
but also a frank discussion of exactly how many Eskimo words
there are for snow and the longest known palindrome in any
language ("saippuakivikauppias"--Finland). And all right, what in fact is "tingo"? In the Pascuense
language of Easter Island, it's to take all the objects one
desires from the house of a friend, one at a time, by asking
to borrow them. Well, of course it is. Enhanced by its
ingenious and irresistible little Schott's Miscellany/Eats
Shoots and Leaves package and piquant black-and-white
illustrations throughout, The Meaning of Tingo is a heady
feast for word lovers of all persuasions. Viva Tingo!
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