{"id":36635,"date":"2018-10-12T01:00:26","date_gmt":"2018-10-12T05:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=36635"},"modified":"2018-09-22T09:20:45","modified_gmt":"2018-09-22T13:20:45","slug":"qotd-more-words-we-need-in-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/10\/12\/qotd-more-words-we-need-in-english\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: More words we need in English"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>There are some words out there that are brilliantly evocative and at the same time impossible to fully translate. Yiddish has the word <em>shlimazl<\/em>, which basically means a perpetually unlucky person. German has the word <em>Backpfeifengesicht<\/em>, which roughly means a face that is badly in need of a fist. And then there\u2019s the Japanese word <em>tsundoku<\/em>, which perfectly describes the state of my apartment. It means buying books and letting them pile up unread.<\/p>\n<p>The word dates back to the very beginning of modern Japan, the Meiji era (1868-1912) and has its origins in a pun. <em>Tsundoku<\/em>, which literally means reading pile, is written in Japanese as \u7a4d\u3093\u8aad. <em>Tsunde oku<\/em> means to let something pile up and is written \u7a4d\u3093\u3067\u304a\u304f. Some wag around the turn of the century swapped out that <em>oku<\/em> (\u304a\u304f) in <em>tsunde oku<\/em> for <em>doku<\/em> (\u8aad) \u2013 meaning to read. Then since <em>tsunde doku<\/em> is hard to say, the word got mushed together to form <em>tsundoku<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Jonathan Crow, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.openculture.com\/2014\/07\/tsundoku-should-enter-the-english-language.html\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;&#8216;Tsundoku,&#8217; the Japanese Word for the New Books That Pile Up on Our Shelves, Should Enter the English Language&#8221;, <em>Open Culture<\/em><\/a>, 2014-07-24.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are some words out there that are brilliantly evocative and at the same time impossible to fully translate. Yiddish has the word shlimazl, which basically means a perpetually unlucky person. German has the word Backpfeifengesicht, which roughly means a face that is badly in need of a fist. And then there\u2019s the Japanese word [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,24,41],"tags":[400],"class_list":["post-36635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-japan","category-quotations","tag-language"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9wT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36635"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36636,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36635\/revisions\/36636"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}