The Serendipity of Untranslatable Words
Being a speaker of several languages, I often find a foreign word popping into one of my sentences when I am speaking English. Those of you who speak another language may support me in the fact that, just sometimes, there is a so much more succinct way of expressing something in another language, where English can only resort to a string of words. The problem is also that this ONE foreign word may also evoke a different emotional response, or transport the speaker back into another world, that the non-
An example contributed by our South African staff member today was the Afrikaans slang word “KNUIPING” which indicated the clenching of the buttocks when experiencing fear in order to avoid an untimely accident! Well, that got us laughing and thinking…speaker will simply not understand.
