Expand-a-band: Vocabulary Stash! (Aug 20-26)
This week’s snapshots:
Happy Saturday to you!
I had juuuuuuust gotten over jet lag this week, and now I’m back to my original time zone! We did some big hikes, ate a meter-long cheese pita (pictured: the last 5cm) and spent some quality time playing board games in between. I’m disappointed that I couldn’t spend more time with the fam, but grateful for a job that offers me adequate freedom to leave the country when it’s cheap for me :) I’m looking forward to setting up a front-of-house next week!
The fam was talking about words that we love in our foreign languages that don’t have an English equivalent. And I’m sure you’ve seen the lists on the Internet of such words from around the world - Sonder is practically English now, as often as I’ve seen it floating about xD Here’s a sampling of the list we came up with for the Slavic languages we know:
Przemeblować (PL) - to rearrange the furniture in your house. This is a fun word because it’s a prefix+verb, so you can say a LOT of very specific things about furniture and their movement. Mom and I both find that a little bit of przemeblowanie can really help us feel rejuvenated and refreshed when we’re feeling drab or otherwise trapped.
Załatwiać (PL, slang) - to take care of something. I laughed about this one because to Mom it meant, “erranding” (Imma take care of those errands we need to run) but to Brother it was what the villain told his henchmen to do to the protagonist (go take care of those nosy teenagers and their dumb dog, okay?). It’s a very useful word for a lot of contexts!
Tarapaty (PL) - a very specific kind of trouble that connotes a growing sense of dread, such as a minor inconvenience turning into a real disaster. It is tarapaty when your workplace needs to hire more technicians to make jobs doable without overstretching the teams, but they can’t retain the technicians they hire long enough to actually grow the team to an adequate size.
Oraspoložiti (BiH, slang): to be in a good mood. Add the prefix “not” to be in a bad mood with a single word! Interestingly, in Bosnia their greeting-question of choice is not, “how are you?” (aka the perfect question for such a word) but, “Are you tired?” I think I will adopt this myself by henceforth describing my mood instead of my condition in response to the English’s greeting-question of choice.
Prekosinoc (BiH): the night before last night. Most European languages have words for “the day after tomorrow” and “the day before yesterday” but Bosnian goes above and beyond and can also tell you if it was evening on that day. English has these words, but nobody except me will tell you I got home from the airport ereyesterday and that I have to go back to work overmorrow. I find that f a s c i n a t i n g because the inclusion (or rather exclusion) of those words changes the way you relate to time.
Culture is described as the things that appear so obvious that you never talk about them - making it only possible, then, to really talk about culture when you find yours contrasts with another. For example, did you know that it’s illegal to homeschool in Bosnia? To enforce everybody’s access to the same education, if you are a foreigner under the age of 18 in Bosnia, you can only get a visa through your school.
The Bosnian cultural belief - only exposed by Americans who want to homeschool their children - is that education should be performed by professionals. “I don’t trust the so-called ‘professionals’,” is met with, “Then look for better ones.” The Americans whose underlying cultural values say, “freedom is a human right that can’t be earned” will inevitably be at odds with the Bosnians whose underlying values say, “freedom is a social privilege I must work to deserve.”
The cultural belief common to both sides of the argument is that children should a) have access to free education and b) be required to use that access, which is not a global underlying belief. Historian-on-YouTube JPDraper posted a video reminding me of this fact by making a short list of some statements/beliefs that were recorded on the streets of London before a general education was made mandatory. Wanna play a game? Tell me whether a historical Londoner or a modern American has been recorded saying some of these things:
“England is in London, right?”
“I know how to count, that’s enough math for me!”
“I’ve heard about Jesus Christ, but I don’t actually know anything about him or care to know.”
If you guessed I have heard each of these quotes come out of the mouths of a modern American (some of them teens), you’d be right! However, I ripped these specific quotes from the historical Londoners… Draw your conclusions accordingly (:
I think that if I could make one thing mandatory in American classrooms, it would be fluency in a foreign language. Not, “I can find the bathroom,” fluency, but “I can argue, if simply, about my values,” fluency. Because in addition to expanding their relationship with time with every other language’s use of “overmorrow” and “ereyesterday” (and teaching them about “ananas”), kids would have to spend a significant part of their education considering their unspoken beliefs, and who those beliefs serve.
Is there a word you wish you could add to the English language (I desperately wish I could teach everyone “tarapaty”!)? If you could add (or subtract) one mandatory element of America’s mandatory education, what would you change?
Tell me about it,
—Beth
