Foreign Words That Desperately Need An English Equivalent
English has tons of words, but many situations, feelings, and parts of the human condition only have descriptive words in other languages. English needs these words, too, and we're going to give them to you. You're welcome.
Fingerspitzengefuhl (German)
This one doesn't mean what you think, so get your mind out of the gutter. Fingerspitzengefuhl is a wonderful German word that refers to something the world could use lots more of: the ability to navigate through tricky social situations and come out safely on the other side.
Say you're over at a friend's house, and they show you an art project that their 5-year-old did. You honestly can't tell if it's supposed to be a house and family, or an abstract representation of the apocalypse, and that friend doesn't tell you which it is. They do, however, ask you what you think of it, and in that split second, you know you need to put together something of a coherent answer. If you can spin a fanciful tale about whatever it is that was finger-smeared on the paper in 10 different colors of paint and leave the parent feeling even prouder, you've got fingerspitzengefuhl.
If you puzzle over it and mutter something along the lines of not having the foggiest idea what you're looking at, you're going to make that parent sad. You have no fingerspitzengefuhl.
The world needs more fingerspitzengefuhl but, as fun as it is to say, English needs a word that you can use — quickly — to describe someone being tact in the face of something potentially awkward. That's notrollio.
As in: He sighed. She had the poetry notebook again. She loved to ask him what he thought of her latest poem, but he was running out of notrollio.
Kalsarikannit (Finnish)
It's Friday night, and you've had one of those weeks. You're supposed to go out for Happy Hour, but standing in your underwear, looking in your closet ... putting on clothes just seems like a whole unnecessary level of hassle. Who invented these stupid social constructs, anyway? And for what, to go out and spend a fortune on watered-down drinks while getting a headache from all the inane conversation and the inevitable bad cover band? That's nonsense. Then you realize: you have a perfectly good bottle of rum here, but no mixers. That's okay. Mixers are for amateurs. Your cat is here, too, and cats understand. So, you turn off your phone, crack open that bottle, and you definitely just stay in your underwear.
Because the Fins are awesome people who totally get you, they have a word for that. It's kalsarikannit, and it means exactly how you decided to spend your Friday night. (Or, if you're like us, your Monday through Sunday nights.)
There's even an emoji for this in Finland, but alas, no such luck in English. We propose nakienewdled. Its emoji can be a little Al Bundy with hands down pants.
As in: She hung up the phone, took a breath, then grinned and broke into her nakienewdled dance, secure in the knowledge that pants were unnecessary for tonight, and wine didn't care one way or the other.
Trivselbit (Swedish)
It's that time in the relationship, when you're invited back to the family home to meet the parents. You want to make the best impression you can and, fortunately, they're very nice. They've even laid out a dessert spread, including a tray of cupcakes. Everyone's had one, but there's one left. Do you take it? You really, really want it, and you're pretty sure your stomach just growled. Could they hear it? Maybe. You're seriously distracted by this point, because you don't want to think about that going to waste, but you can't remember what the etiquette says. Should they be offering? Why aren't they? Heathens!
That last cupcake has a name in Sweden, and it's the trivselbit. If you were in Sweden, you should take it under no circumstances whatsoever, because that would be rude. That's because there's rules in Sweden, and frankly, it makes it a whole lot easier to know just where you stand on important things like this.
English needs a word for that last little piece that's left on the plate, and we propose calling it a gastro-itch. Because that's exactly what it is, and to hell with manners. They're just fake social constructs, anyway.
As in: He stared into the fridge, feeling the kind of hungry that only happens at 3 am. There was some pie left, but would he get in trouble for eating the gastro-itch? Probably, but 3 am didn't care and neither did he.
Fremdschamen (German)
Fremdschamen is a relative newcomer to the German language, and it means... well, have you ever been sitting in the office, waiting for a meeting to start, when the presenter walks in all smiles and charm, clearly having just come from the bathroom and clearly having forgotten to zip his fly? Your face might turn a bit red, and you might see a twitter of empathetic embarrassment go around the room, as everyone hopes someone else will be the one to tell him. That sense of being embarrassed because someone else is embarrassing themselves is called fremdschamen in Germany, and absolutely nothing in English.
This happens so often, English definitely needs a word for it. The Germans just up and invented one a few years back (2007, to be exact), so why not? How about pooptwaddle? It's clearly nonsensical twaddle that you feel embarrassed on behalf of someone else — especially if they're a jerk — and what's the most embarrassing thing in the world? Poop, that's what.
As in: She felt flushed from the pooptwaddle that came as soon as he walked into the meeting wearing what looked like rejects from the costume department of Hawaii 5-0.
Hygge (Danish)
Hygge is a pretty complicated term, and it's one of those things that you know when you experience it. It's a Danish word that refers to a state of being that's uber-comfortable, but it's a bit more than that, too. Talking about some things that are hygge might make more sense. Say it's freezing cold outside, with feet of snow and more coming, with wind howling and the darkness so deep you're sure it's never going to leave. But you're sitting inside in front of a blazing fire, wrapped in fleece and wool, drinking a hot toddy and reading a book. There's probably a cat involved, and she's purring.
Basically, it's the feeling of finally getting together with a few friends who you haven't seen in forever, and picking up like no time's gone by at all. It's hanging out in a hot tub under a clear, star-filled sky, it's a candlelight dinner with your best guy or gal, it's an unexpected day off work (when you're not sick, but you can still stay in bed), it's heading out to the woods for some R&R in the middle of nowhere.
English doesn't just need this word, it needs more of this. Since hot toddies are the most hygge thing we can think of, and hygge is already a weirdly adorable term, how about something equally warm and adorable like ... hawtawdles? Hawtawdles sounds like something we would like to be filled with.
As in: She looked over at her old friends, laughing over steaming mugs of hot chocolate, nothing but the flickering fire lighting up the room. If there were any more hawtawdles in here, she'd start to think she was in a Lifetime movie.
Hiraeth (Welsh)
It usually happens late at night (or early in the morning, depending on your point of view). You're most of the way through the bottle of your drink of choice, and you start hitting that melancholy stage. You start thinking, and when you're that right amount of drunk and thinking, that's a dangerous time. You start thinking about what it would be like if your family was just a little more understanding, if your neighbors were the kind to invite over for a backyard BBQ, if your weekends belonged to you instead of to shuffling the kids back and forth.
Aw heck, what if you never had kids? What if you were living in a world where you were a free soul, beholden to no one, nobody to answer to, with nobody to tell you that having cake for breakfast is Setting A Bad Example. That world has never been, but you miss it anyway ... and that feeling is a feeling of hiraeth.
It might seem like it has too many vowels and not enough lllwdd's to be Welsh, but it is, and it describes the sort of national feeling of being foreigners attached to Britain. It's the idea that home isn't what you think home should be or feel like, and it's not the home you want. You can miss that home you want as powerfully as if you'd actually experienced it, and we can all relate to that on some level. If you've ever felt like a stranger in your own home, that's hiraeth. But hiraeth is a tongue-twister to say right, so we like nomostalgia.
As in: She might have chosen college over backpacking across Europe, but she couldn't look at photos of Venice without feeling a certain amount of nomostalgia, certain that if she had gone, she'd be settled into a little canal-side apartment with two cats and a canary right now.
Saudade (Portuguese)
Saudade is similar to the idea of the hiraeth, in that it's a pretty heartbreaking sense of longing. It's one of the so-called "mother" words, referring to an existential condition that binds us all as human beings, one that we all recognize and one that transcends the laws of time and the physical world.
What? Exactly. Saudade is that feeling you get when you realize there's something your soul really, really wants — no, needs — and there's some epic, infinite force in the universe that's preventing it from happening, and will prevent it from ever happening. Or happening again. We should have warned you that this one's pretty heavy.
Imagine experiencing the pure, powerful nature of a childhood love when you're say, eight or nine. A tragic accident takes away that love and you're left, for the rest of your life, wanting to rekindle that best friendship and watch it grow. You know it's never going to happen, that it can't happen, and you'll never see this person again. There's a bittersweet joy in remembering them, but there's also a melancholy despair that comes with knowing you'll never see them again, speak to them again, or tell them just what they meant.
That's saudade, and we'd like to suggest a much easier way to describe this feeling that everyone knows, an English for this feeling of infinite ache of the soul: mystful.
As in: She always got a little mystful when she thought about the mall. Good times, good friends... it was a pity it had been all but destroyed by the zombies now. She'd kill for an Orange Julius.
Schadenfreude and gluckschmerz (German)
You're familiar with schadenfreude, and if you're like us, it's one of your favorite things in the world (although you'd only ever admit that to us, and your secret is safe). But it's important to talk about schadenfreude since we're talking about gluckschmerz, since they sort of go hand-in-hand.
Say you're spending your afternoon watching a football game. Then say the opposing team's quarterback trips over his own feet, taking out a cameraman and a cooler full of Gatorade. He's never going to live that down, but you think it's hilarious. That's schadenfreude, a hard word to say through giddy laughter, so we like gnarlykarma.
On the other hand, say your team fumbles and the other recovers for a gauntlet-style touchdown run. They're undoubtedly thrilled, but you? You feel a deep sense of loathing, and maybe you even throw something. That pain you feel at someone else being incredibly happy and/or lucky is gluckschmerz, and it's nothing to be ashamed of. We've all felt it, probably while we're congratulating someone on a winning raffle ticket (they totally didn't deserve it), or when we hear someone win a prize we were trying to call in to a radio station for. (They didn't deserve it either.) We feel it when we hit "like" on Facebook, when we respond to tweets and messages ... gluckschmerz is all around us. It, too, is hard to say through clenched teeth, so we're pitching the idea of buggerluck.
As in: He felt a little (but, only a little) ashamed at the overwhelming gnarlykarma that bubbled to the surface in a fit of giggles every time he thought of his brother fainting and falling off the stage at graduation, but it was long overdue.
Also as in: High school has been a seething cesspool of buggerluck as his brother skated through — admittedly, being impaled on that iron fence might have been a bit harsh, but he lived, and that made it just hilarious.
Gigil (Filipino/Tagalog)
Quick, look at that adorable little puppy. LOOK AT IT! If you're a normal, dog-loving person, you're now in a state of being so overwhelmed by cuteness, you just don't know what to do. Do you want to hug him and squeeze him and never let him go, like some real-life version of a John Steinbeck character? Do you want to name him George and take him home and roll around in his adorable glory? Do you feel just a little bit annoyed that he's on the other side of that picture, and you can't do any of those things? Is there a little bit of rage there?
There's a word for that, and it's gigil. Specifically, it's a Tagalog word that means something is so adorable you have this incredible urge to pinch its cheeks, and you're probably gritting your teeth in slightly repressed rage at either not being able to do it, or the knowledge that aggression in the face of cuteness is generally frowned upon.
With the plethora of adorable puppy and kitten pictures and videos out there, how is there not an English word for this? There should be, and it should be squeerage.
As in: When the kittens started to crawl around and show their bellies, it caused a wave of squeerage that registered on the Richter scale.
Utepils (Norweigan)
Winter's been long, with little sun, dark and dreary afternoons, and miserable weather. You might be stuck inside for a lot of the time, and it's been a long, horrible few months. But finally, the weather breaks just enough so you can lug the grill back out onto the back porch, probably over the last few patches of leftover snow. You fire it up and throw on some burgers, and start cooking. The Sun's out, and it feels amazing. Warm, even, for the first time in months, so you sit down in the sun, crack open an ice cold beer, and take a drink.
That feeling is utepils, and it's a Norwegian word that captures the feeling of kicking open the doors, basking in the Sun, and drinking. Seriously, the world needs more of this, too, and if you live in cold, dark climates, you can completely appreciate just how powerful utepils can be. Frankly, the whole world's pretty dark lately, one way or another, so that's why we all, English speakers included, need an utepils. As for how to say it, we suggest summersudsup, and that is our definition of a perfect afternoon.
As in: It was a little difficult to enjoy that first summersudsup knowing that nuclear winter had finally broken, but hey, thinning of the herd, man.
Ubuntu (South African)
Ubuntu is an amazing word that we need in English, just because the world needs so, so much more of this entire idea.
It's difficult to translate, but it means something like the worldwide interconnectedness of the human spirit, and the kindness that allows people to build a loving and shared community. Think of a group of strangers coming together to raise money for someone's medical bills, or people from hundreds of miles away, all converging on a site to build someone a new home in a matter of days. It's strangers crossing half the globe to build schools and wells in Africa to make the community a better place, it's opening doors to refugees, it's helping others build a better life simply because you're human, and that's what humans should do.
See why we need an English word for this? The world is in a state where it needs a huge reminder that even a little kindness goes a long way, so we're proposing heartright as a word that will embody all these ideas into one reminder.
As in: It was a shame, she thought as she drove through the run-down remains of the town. A little hard work from people with a little heartright would have this place back on the map, and not the map of infested territory, either.