To Call Each Thing By Its Right Name

It's very hard to think about an abstract concept without a word for it. And it's easy to never think about this effect, because... there's not a word for it.

It seems obvious that it’s hard to talk about something that we don’t have a word.  This is common with new ideas, technologies and the like – until a phrase catches on and becomes common-place, all discussion is coupled with a tone of uncertainty, the feeling of “if that’s what we’re calling it”. It’s the difference between something being the name of a product and simply a noun. Ten years ago (yes, it's been (just short of) ten years) the word iPod was a quirky curiosity. Now it's just a word I use; sure, it refers to a specific company's gadget, but it's a unique enough gadget that it is all-but-officially a noun. And think: "mp3 player", too, has since entered our collective vocabulary - for such a syllabic phrase, it sure seems awfully ordinary nowadays. 

What about something more conceptual? After all, whether we have a good word for an iPod doesn't affect our thoughts much - we don't do a lot of deep thinking about iPods anyway. How about "schadenfreude"? If you're not familiar, schadenfreude describes pleasure at another's misfortune - a very familiar concept, I'm sure, but one that is tricky to express in English. Well, not that tricky, but rougher than, say, "happiness" (...or is it?). I first heard the word in the Avenue Q soundtrack, which came out in 2003, and as far as I know that musical was largely responsible for making the concept so widely known nowadays. Though, it's possible that I was just too young to expect to have heard it prior to that. "Schadenfreude" gives us a word for describing pleasure at another's misfortune - and also a word for condemning it, for confessing it, for preempting it. It allows us to think about "pleasure at another's misfortune" as a single concept, rather than a combination of words whose meanings interfere. 

Let me see if I can convince you with something even more arcane - at least, until it became a novelty on the Internet. May I present: Mamahlapinatapai, a word from the language of the Yaghan people, found off the southern tip of Argentina. It means a look shared by two people, both wishing the other would initiate something that both desire. The funny thing about this concept, mamahlapinatapai, is that I'm certain I'm familiar with it. The idea is not that strange, but we'd never think to recognize it for what it is, to talk about it, without a word for it. Incidentally, this word is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the "most succinct word"; I'm going to trust them on that one. I have to wonder if they have a word for the one-sided version: where you want to initiate something but you don't know if you should. I suspect that look is far more commonplace.

I'm glad we incorporated schadenfreude into our language, and I'm glad we left mamahlapinatapai out. But while the latter is a bit too complicated for us to regularly want to use it, there are surely hundreds of words in their respective languages that we would gladly incorporate into English, if only they would make the rounds in one generation's vocabularies. And I'm certain there are a great many ideas that we can hardly think about, for lack of a word to think about them with. http://betterthanenglish.com/ catalogues some of these fascinating words; it's interesting as a novelty but I'm woefully unsure of how to actually incorporate any of their words into my life. I especially like:

Parea (Greek): a group of friends who gather purely for each other's company.

Koyaanisqatsi (Hopi):  “nature out of balance” or a “way of life that is so crazy it calls for a new way of living”. (Or a peculiar film with a particularly haunting, mesmerizing soundtrack by Philip Glass.)

Sigurista (Tagalog): a person who is extremely concerned with making sure everything goes as planned.

Won (Korean): a person's reluctance to give up an illusion.

This book seems to have more of the same, but I haven't obtained a copy yet.

Of course, there are thousands of words out there that we could find useful, and hundreds that might be easy enough to speak that we would actually adopt them. And sure, there are also hundreds or thousands of nearly unknown English words that could be useful too - but I suspect the foreign words are better. The English words must have faded out of usage for a reason, right? (okay, maybe not. Nevertheless...) It would not take much to bring a word to widespread recognition - a single popular work using it is enough. If it's a good enough word, from there it will spread itself.

By the same logic, I'm advocate the invention of new words and the repurposing of old ones... and, also, the rampant borrowing of words from other languages. If something needs to be said, someone needs to find a good way to say it. And, if it's going to take a good word to allow for good thought, it needs to exist. Language is a chaotic, evolving thing - no, that doesn't excuse "refudiate") - and there is nothing inherently wrong with a well-justified modification. Words like "blog" have to come from somewhere. Of course, getting anyone to adopt your new word or definition is another trick entirely. For that reason it's going to be easier to get new words from other languages than by inventing them out of thin air.

I like to repurpose the word "pornography" to mean "any sort of creation which appeals to senses and delights"; something that unapologetically pleases or satisfies. For example, the movie Avatar was essentially pornography - delightful, beautiful, and amazing to look at, even though its plot was largely trite and unimaginative. I always defend the movie by saying - if you were expecting a wonderfully original plot, you missed the point of the movie. Its archetypal, formulaic narrative was a superficially pleasing, like a children's movie (since that's what it came from...), unabashedly allowing the audience to see as much of the visual capabilities as possible. In being simple and satisfying, it succeeded wonderfully, and I'll say I loved it because I did (in the theater). If this goal of "pornography" is something you simply reject in a movie, then it wasn't for you. This definition also works nicely for EarthPorn.

Even if a good word doesn't exist, it's going to be useful to know what we want a word for. Here are some requests; maybe somebody can find them for me, in English or elsewhere:

I want a word for a politician's hubris, the kind that makes him/her serve money while pretending to fight for the poor. A word we can accuse a politician of when they vote for tax cuts for the rich in a depression, that sort of thing. It's a concept that needs to be demonized, and it's hard to demonize something without a word for it.

I want a word for a feeling I get when I'm trying to work very hard without a deadline. I focus on something and try to make it important, but I get an impulse in the back of my mind that wants me to do something destructive instead of focusing on what I'm trying to think about - to tab over to Facebook or Gmail, or to go play another round of a video-game. Something actively counterproductive. I can't explain it, but it happens and I'm certain it's not just me. It's much harder to recognize this happening, though, without a word for it.

I want more words to take over the purpose of the word "happy". I think it's a great shame that the word "happy" is considered the summarizing opposite of "depressed" by many; I think the concept of "happiness" is so vague - in that it describes a number of individual states that all work - that it becomes something unattainable. This idea was inspired by a Reddit post by a depressed individual who couldn't figure out how people could be happy. The fact is, there's a lot of things people can be, and none of them are described by what we think of by the word "happy". Among others, there's:  ignorance-is-bliss happy, happy simply because being there was never a question otherwise, not caring; constant-wonder happy, where a person is so in love with life they feel positively all the time; a sort of zen-understanding happy, where everything makes sense leaving the bearer content; etc. Not everyone will be capable of most of these, but, aiming for a nebulous concept of "happiness" is a quest destined to fail, and unfortunately in the case that inspired this, that failure was considerably exacerbating the problem.