ekphrasis

a full-scale rehearsal of a (real or imaginary) picture's form and content, trying for a wholesale transposition, a verbal equivalent

normative social influence, also, Losing

normative social influence - "follow the crowd", everyone stands in a line; you do so as well. Everyone drinking a beer. You're more likely to do so as well.

Also, too much exposure to things (ads) will start to have an adverse effect.

"Two Ways of Losing"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5HQaVy85s0 

losing are emotional events that make us (more) impulsive

people who lose tend to gamble *more* / higher next round. Losers tend to lose more.

regulatory focus: when dealing with responsibilities, motivations, goals, 

- promotion focus: preoccuptation with growth, realising ones outcomes, realising ambitions
usually work faster
trying to make victory happen
tend to perform better when dealing with failure
more likely to quit temporarily (instead of forever)
more likely to switch tasks
outperform preventors when they are required to switch tasks
switching is another chance to perform something new
studies suggest more likely to report higher well-being

- prevention focus: safety, securyt, avoiding undesirable outcomes, fulfilling one's responsibilities
likely to focus on tasks needed
trying to avoid failure/loss
more likely to quit (for good) when dealing with failure
often unable to move on from undertaking, as they are focused on preventing loss
perform better on tasks involving perseveration, less susceptible to distracted
less likely to swap
winning becomes more relief than a prize

makom

 

Makom is een even cruciaal als wonderlijk begrip, een paradox in een woord. Het betekent zowel 'plek' als 'geen plek'. Je kunt er zowel de stad Jeruzalem mee aanduiden, een plek die je kunt bezoeken, maar ook God, een wezen waarvan niemand weet waar het huist. Het woord makom omvat tegelijk het verlangen naar een plek om thuis te zijn samen en het besef dat een thuisgevoel ongrijpbaar is. 'Mokum, de Jiddische benaming van Amsterdam, is een verbastering van makom'

Polish words

żólć

Refers to bile, but also symbolizes deep bitterness or resentment.

kilkanaście

refers to any number between 11 and 19

Fernando Pessoa - "Anarchist Banker"

 

[translator's note]

The most serious problem of Honig's translation is to render the central concept of ficçǒes sociaes as 'social myths'. For Pessoa, myths were more real than surface 'realities'. But a ficcǎo social for the Banker was merely a fiction, a lie, a false tradition, designed to perpetuate injustice. It possesses none of the veiled redeeming features of a myth. The Portugueses term for myth, mito, was quite familiar to Pessoa, but he chose not to use it in this context. The English cognate fiction is the proper translation.

readers of translations, not excepting this one, should keep in their mind the Italian proverb tradutorre, traditore – 'translator, betrayer'.

Swedish words about travel

flygskam - shame of flying

tågskryt - train brag

loanword & calque

English has two different terms for words that come into English from other languages. A 'calque' is translated from the source language. (E.g., flea market, beer garden, paper tiger.) A 'loanword' is ported in its original form. (E.g., cafe, bazaar, kindergarten) Perhaps ironically, the word 'calque' is a loanword, while the 'loanword' is a calque (from Ger. 'lehnwort').

words with no English equivalent

the Danish word hygge. It means the comfortable, secure, and enjoyable feeling of a space, a gathering, an event. “Last night was so hyggelig”, or “your house is hyygglig”. I love it. Snuggly

Mono no aware - Japanese. Untranslatable, but roughly: wistful melancholy at the realization that living is ephemeral (over too soon).

Saudade - Portuguese. Also untranslatable but, approximately: The sadness of deep longing for one’s true homeland.

Կարոտ (karot / garod) — the state of longing for a place, time, person/s, interactions, events or even things, usually one’s home, homeland, loved ones. Similar to saudade but even more complex

The word "yalla" in Lebanese dialect has many meanings depending on its context. Could mean "I'm coming" or "hurry up", can be used to cheer someone on, or even be like a verbal "shrug".

Irish: craic. Example usage: "The craic was great". Meaning: you enjoyed yourself / had a fun time / were entertained and laughed a lot / had good chats / in good company. Can also mean news or gossip, i.e "What's the craic?" = "Any news?"

the Hungarian hiányérzet, which is the feeling that some unnamed, unknown thing that you can't quite put your finger on is missing.

Indonesian.

Kami = refers to a group of people that includes the speaker but not the person being spoken to.

Kita = refers to a group of people that includes the speaker & the person being spoken to.

in English, both words are simply referred to as "we".

Arabic: soubhiyé. That quiet time when you’re the only one awake in the house and can enjoy a cup of coffee before the day starts

I love 'sobremesa' in Spanish, which describes that chill time around the table with those you love - normally after you've finished eating, and you're just chatting and connecting

My favourite is the Japanese "Tsujigiri", the term for trying out your newly acquired sword by decapitating a random passer-by...

the Japanese word tsundoku (積ん読), meaning acquiring books and letting them pile up without reading them.

My grandfather would say the Finnish word "sisu." Loosely translated, "stoic determination, tenacity of purpose, grit, bravery, resilience and hardiness," but it's hard to describe in English. You might hate doing a thing, but the thing has to be done, so you will do the thing.

Flotsam, jetsam, lagan, derelict

Flotsam - cargo that fell overboard

Jetsam - cargo jettisoned overboard intentionally

Lagan - cargo at the bottom of the sea, still retrievable 

Derelict - cargo at the bottom of the sea, irretrievable

Petrichor - words

petrichor

The distinctive scent which accompanies the first rain after a long warm dry spell.

The yellow organicoil that yields this scent.

unrelated words (etymologically not related)

https://theweek.com/articles/541713/15-pairs-words-that-seem-etymologically-related-but-arent

mono no aware

mono no aware, literally "the pathos of things" and also translated as "an empathy toward things", or "a sensitivity to ephemera", is a Japanese term for the awareness of impermanence, or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life.

ambergris

ambergris - "hardened whale feces"

petrichor - the sublime scent emitted when rain hits rock or pavement

Mark Forsyth - "The Etymologicon"

An amazing book linking words and their history together.  Almost too many examples to quote.

Every weakness of human nature comes out in the history of etymology. Probably the most damning word is probably. Two thousand years ago the Romans had the word probablis. If something probablis then it could be proved by experiment, because the two words come from the same root: probare.
    But probablis got overused. People are always more certain of things than they really should be, and that applied to the Romans just as much as to us. Roman lawyers would claim that their case probabilis, when it wasn't. Roman astrologers would say that their predictions were probabilis when they weren't. And absolutely any sane Roman would tell you that it was probabilis that the Sun went round the Earth. So by the time poor probably first turned up in English in 1387 it was already a poor, exhausted word whose best days were behind it, and only meant likely.

Sausages make taste lovely, but it's usually best not to ask what's actually in them. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it was a sausage-maker who disposed of the body. In nineteenth-century America, the belief that sausages were usually made out of dog meat was so widespread that they started to be called hotdogs.

The funny thing about archery is that you don't usually aim at the target. Gravity decrees that if you aim straight at the blank your arrow will hit somewhere below. So you point the arrow somewhere above the blank, and hope that this cancels out the effects of Newton's troublesome invention. That's why aim high is another archer's term; it doesn't mean that you'll end up high, or it's not meant to. You aim high and hit on the level.

The Oxford Dictionary admits that 'In Middle English it is often doubtful whether blac, blak, blacke, means "black, dark" or "pale, colourless, wan, livid". [...] There are two good explanations. Unfortunately nobody is quite sure which one is true. [...]
    Once upon a time, there was an old Germanic word for burnt, which was black, or as close to black as makes no differnce. The confusion arose because the old Germanics couldn't decide between black and white as to which colour burning was. Some old Germans said that when things were burning they were bright and shiny, and other old Germans said that when things were burnt they turned black.
    The result was a hopeless monochrome confusion, until everyone got bored and rode off to sack Rome. The English were left holding black, which could mean either pale or dark, but slowly settled on one usage. The French also imported this useless black word. They then put an N in it and later sold it on to the English as blank, leaving us with black and blank as opposites.
    The other theory (which is rather less likely, but still good fun) is that there was an old German word black which meant bare, void, and empty. What do you have if you don't have any colours?
    Well, it's hard to say really. If you close your eyes you see nothing, which is black, but a blank piece of paper is, usually, white. Under this theory, blankness is the original sense and the two colours – black and white – are simply different interpretations of what blank means.
    And, just to prove the point even more irritatingly, bleach comes from the same root and can mean to make pale, or any substance used for making things black. Moreover, bleak is probably just a variant of bleach and once meant white.

 

The Old English word for bread was hlaf, from which we get loaf; and the Old English division of labour was that women made bread and men guarded it. The woman was therefore the hlaf-dige and the man was the hlaf-ward.

Hlafward and Hlafdige
Hlaford and Hlafdi
Lavord and Lavedi
Lord and Lady

 

In 1898 a German pharmaceutical company called Bayer decided to develop an alternative to [addictive morphine]. [...] and worked out a new chemical: diacetylmorphone, which they marketed as a 'non-addictive morphine substitute'. [...]
   Bayer's marketing chaps set to work. They asked the people who had taken diacetylmorphine how it made them feel, and the response was unanimous: it made you feel great. Like a hero. So the marketing chaps decided to call their new product heroin. Heroin remained a Bayer trademark until the First World War.

Anacreon's poems (anacreontics) are all about getting drunk. [...] In the eighteenth century an English gentleman's club was founded in Anacreon's memory. Two members wrote a society drinking song called 'To Anacreon in Heav'n'; a good song with a catchy tune. Because it was hard to sing, it became an ad hoc test of drunkenness used by the police in the eighteenth century.
    Francis Scott Key was an American lawyer. During the war of 1812, he was sent to negotiate with the British fleet for the releaes of certain prisoners. He dined aboard HMS Tonnant, but when the time came for him to leave, the British got worried. Key was not familiar with the British battleships; if he went ashore he could and would pass all this information on to the American forces. They insisted he remained on board and he was forced to watch the bombardment from the wrong side. The American flag at Baltimore remained high and visible amid the smoke. Key decided to write a song about it. He stole the tune from the Anacreontic Society, but wrote new words that went:
    O, say can you see by the dawn's early light...

 

Alcohol comes from [Arabic] al (the) kuhul, which was a kind of make-up. Indeed, some ladies still use kohl to line their eyes.
    As kohl is an extract and a dye, alcohol started to mean the pure essence of anything (there's a 1661 reference to the alcohol of an ass's spleen), but it wasn't until 1672 that somebody at the Royal Society had the brgiht idea of finding the pure essence of wine. What was it in wine that made you drunk? What was the alcohol of wine? Soon wine-alcohol (or essence of wine) became the only alcohol anybody could remember.

= is an equal sign because the two lines are of equal length.

There's a small dot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean whose natives called their home Coconut Island, or Pikini, which was mangled into English as Bikini Atoll.
    Bikini Atoll was put on the map by America in 1946 when they tested their new atomic bombs there. Atom is Greek for unsplittable, but the Americans had discovered that by breaking the laws of etymology, they were able to create vast explosions, and vast explosions were the best way of impressing the Soviets and winning the Cold War.
    In 1954 the Americans tested their new hydrogen bomb. It turned out to be an awful lot more powerful and ended up accidentally irradiating the crew of a Japanese fishing boat. Japanese public opinion was outraged.  Protests were made, hackles were raised, and a film was made about an irresponsible nuclear test that awoke a sea monster called Gorilla-whale or Gojira. The film was rushed through production and came out later in the same year. Gojira was, allegedly, simply the nickname of a particularly burly member of the film crew. Gojira was anglicised to Godzilla.
    [...]
    But where the Japanese saw a threatening monster, the French saw what the French always see: sex. A fashion designer called Jacques Heim had just come up with a design for a two-piece bathing costume that he believed would be the world's smallest swimsuit. He took it to a lingerie shop in Paris where the owner, Louis Réard, proved with a pair of scissors that it could be even more scandalously immodest. The result, Réard calimed, would cause an explosion of lust in the loins of every Frenchman so powerful that it could only be compared to the tests at Bikini Atoll, so he called the new swimwear the bikini.

 

 

Traders in North America: the native Americans didn't care for money.  They used sea shells.  At some point, traders started using tobacco, but it was large and cumbersome.  They gave up on that, and started to use deerskin. Buckskins soon bcame the common barter of North America and a standard barter basically is money.  So money became "bucks".

 

apophasis

 Apophasis (/əˈpɒfəsɪs/; Greek: ἀπόφασις from ἀπόφημι apophemi,[1] "to say no") is a rhetorical device wherein the speaker or writer brings up a subject by either denying it, or denying that it should be brought up. Accordingly, it can be seen as a rhetorical relative of irony.

The device is also called paralipsis (παράλειψις) – also spelled paraleipsis or paralepsis – or occupatio, and known also as praeteritio, preterition, or parasiopesis (παρασιώπησις).

As a rhetorical device, apophasis can serve a number of purposes.

It can be employed to raise an ad hominem or otherwise controversial attack while disclaiming responsibility for it, as in, "I refuse to discuss the rumor that my opponent is a drunk." This can make it a favored tactic in politics.

Lilith and the Draconcopes - Maiden-headed tempters from the Talmud to Boccaccio

Interesting enough article about why the snake so often has a woman's head with long blond curls. How Lilith was Adam's first wife, not from his rib, but as equals, thus banished, then became the snake.

hapox legomenon, a word that only occurs once in the Bible

Steven Poole - "A Word for Every Day of the Year"

Entertaining, though not every word is great. 20th of May: Quodlibetarian: "people who express half-formed opinions on any subject under the sun. [...] one willing to talk, as though knowledgeably, about anything at all."

tsundoku

(n.) buying books and not reading them; letting books pile up unread on shelves or floors or nightstands

hebrew proverb - don't ask questions

אל תשאל שאלות לא תשמע שקרים

Al Tishal she'elot Lo tishma shkarim

don't ask questions, you won't hear lies

(it's for a cheating husband situation imo but it works well for a lot of cases)

meretricious persiflage

(appearing in D.H. Lawrence's "Women in love"

meretricious persiflage: "apparently attractive but actually valueless small talk"