The BBC website has all sorts of treats and the latest has tickled me, and even moreso to find they have set up a blog: www.themeaningoftingo.com
The author, Adam Jacot de Boinod, has collected words and phrases from around the world that could be adopted by the English langauge in the way we have already adopted words such as Khaki and croissant. Usually these are single words whereas we don't have a word to describe the same thing.
From the BBC site I love this quote:
The German propensity for compound words pays dividends. Kummerspeck is a German word which literally means grief bacon: it is the word that describes the excess weight gained from emotion-related overeating.
Last quote from the BBC site:
Which brings us back to de Boinod's title: tingo is an invaluable word from the Pascuense language of Easter Island meaning "to borrow objects from a friend's house, one by one, until there's nothing left".
Or is someone having us on.... "where'd 'at t'ing go?" :-)
Original Comments:
Ow!! And you complained about my jokes...I have a fair bit of Kummerspeck on me right now too.
By the way, to put you out of your misery - if you are still in it which I doubt - the pictures you tried to guess (you and...erm...nobody else) were:
In reverse order...
The Lake District (correct)
Hadrian's Wall (correct)
and
not Paris (though I can see where you are coming from)
but
Edinburgh.
You are the weakest and strongest link..goodbye!
Monday, September 26, 2005 3:56:00 PM
What a wonderful book. Full of fascinating factettes. Love the blog, too!
Monday, September 26, 2005 4:09:00 PM
Great stuff Grans!
Peace..........
Tuesday, September 27, 2005 3:10:00 AM
lol i like tingo too. i'd like to find some site that talks about all the words you & cheryl use that are foreign to us in america. granted, they are english & i realized some time ago, you DO speak english & i want to learn it!
Tuesday, September 27, 2005 7:38:00 AM
That made me smile. I'll start using it immediately, joke or not :).
Tuesday, September 27, 2005 9:54:00 AM
I think the weirdest word the English language has adopted is "cul de sac" - It just doesn't make sense....
Tuesday, September 27, 2005 11:34:00 AM
I liked best the german word for a face that cries out for a fist.
Tuesday, September 27, 2005 3:28:00 PM
Ooh! I saw that one too. It reminds me of what I call "the language of science" - to us words like "velocity" and "speed" have very precise (and distinct) meanings that aren't conveyed in their normal English usage. Not to pimp my blog, but...
Saturday, October 01, 2005 12:40:00 AM
You can pimp it girl! :-) It's a great blog.
Saturday, October 01, 2005 1:05:00 AM