Why Isn't There A Word For That?

There are a lot of things it seems we should have a word for, but don't. Why do we have these lexical gaps? Produced for Mental Floss

[@laineylarsen245]

"Are you calling me a liar!?" "I ain't calling you a truther!"

[@whalesinlamentation5351]

I was looking for this comment

[@laineylarsen245]

@@whalesinlamentation5351 so was I and I couldn't find it - I was surprised I was the first one to make that reference lol

[@M00nSlippers]

Truthin'. We must make this a mainstream word.

[@FlowUrbanFlow]

It sounds 2021

[@alexandrebergamo6539]

It seems too artificial. It would sound better if it were a verb like sincering or honesting.

[@avivastudios2311]

I like truing better.

[@desanipt]

It really hurt me when "saudade" was presented as a Brazilian word, being a Portuguese, when it's used in the entire Portuguese speaking world.

[@suchanhachan]

I'm guessing the writer encountered the word in a Brazilian context, and failed to consider that it might be a general Portuguese word, rather than a specifically Brazilian word...

[@lailedcat]

I'm reminded of an old-school vlogbrothers video where it was decided that the opposite of virgin should be "virgout".

[@EddyGurge]

I've never considered this, the idea that we tend to name bad things, and not good. You are wondrously teachoulous in your contrafibulations.

[@KettuKakku]

EddyGurge I would've said wonderfully taughtful myself...

[@mrausch73]

"Saudade" directly translates as "longing." The rest is added on emotionally as a cultural conceit.

[@fusunhanim4217]

Thank you!!!!

[@dliessmgg]

One topic that interests/confuses me: when English speakers invent a word on the fly, they always follow it up with phrases like "Is that a real word? Probably not." As a native Swiss German speaker I find that quite an odd habit. It's a word that conveyed the information you wanted, in a way that the others understood what you meant. Why shouldn't it be real? Doesn't matter if you just created it.

[@rzeka]

Dliess Mgg I think it's because schools and peers put a lot of emphasis on "correct english", like how people will call you out for writing your instead of you're. I think people who say "is that a real word? probably not." are just predicting that someone will go "That's not a word!" and want to stop that before it happens.

[@fusunhanim4217]

I think technically it should be accepted by the Academy of Language of the country and introduced in the dictionary in order to be considered valid or "a word".

[@andreluiz6023]

@@fusunhanim4217 well, not all languages have that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ english itself doesn't

[@Delgen1951]

@@fusunhanim4217 well good and all except English does not have such a thing as a English Academy of Language. I remember back in the 1980s when the France Academy was having a Hissy fit over the English words "Week End", "Diskette ", " Drug Store" which were entering French.. English does not care it just steals or coins new words all the time.

[@ilonaknuutinen]

Finns invent words on the fly, especially very specific verbs and the meaning can be read from the situation/act :D

[@MrCubicaqua]

I'm rather fond of the word nibling.

[@solosunbeam]

Me too, I've been using it for a while. My siblings have been generous in providing me with many of them.

[@fireriffs]

Meh, sounds like something you'd call small bits of food. I want a better word.

[@Furienna]

In Swedish, there are three different words for "nephews and nieces": "brorsbarn" (brother's kids), "systerbarn" (sister's kids) and "syskonbarn" (sibling's kids).

[@gavinparks5386]

Bairn is a Scots word for child. As in "We're aw Jock Tamson's bairns" meaning we all have something in common.

[@Furienna]

@@gavinparks5386 Yes, I know.

[@SelfPropelledDestiny]

In Parkour, striking ones shin(s) on the edge of a wall, usually from a slipped foot, is known lovingly as a shinjury.

[@SelfPropelledDestiny]

Also, out of ignorance, an impingement of the ankle is referred to as "an ankle thingy" and everyone knows what this means.

[@masatwwo6549]

In German there are (now oudated) words for uncle of the maternal side (Oheim) and paternal side (Vetter) as well as a general word for uncle (Onkel). As the importance of the difference between maternal and paternal side ceased they simply disappeared from the active language.

[@rawjena5180]

Vetter is another word for cousin, not uncle.

[@masatwwo6549]

for both: Onkel = ein Bruder des Vaters (früher Vetter), beziehungsweise ein Bruder der Mutter (früher Oheim) de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verwandtschaftsbeziehung#Onkel_und_Tante www.wissen.de/wortherkunft/vetter

[@TomRNZ]

Latin had two words for uncle: avunculus for the mother's brother, and patruus for the father's brother. Our word "uncle" comes to us from Latin "avunculus" through Old French "oncle".

[@Furienna]

Latin also had different words for aunt: "amita" = father's sister (which is the ancestor of the current English word "aunt") and "matertera" = mother's sister. But neither of these are the ancestors of the words in Spanish ("tio" and "tia") or Italian ("zio" and "zia").

[@patrickhodson8715]

I call my nieces and nephews “niephews”

[@kacperwoch4368]

A Polish concept that is difficult to translate to English: 'załatwić' means to deal with something, to get sth done but implies illegal actions or other suspicious ways that we don't want to reveal. This concept arose from the years under communist rule when ppl had to cheat the state to get sth done. When an influential person 'miracously' finds a workplace for their relative we say 'załatwić pracę' to find a job for someone.

[@chad_bro_chill]

"Questionable" and "dubious," like saying that someone is using methods of questionable legality, do a decent job, but yeah, normally English just uses sarcasm to get the point across. Your use of "miraculously," or when saying that some person had "an accident" (air quotes), are good examples.

[@noledelgado8111]

Nancy Sinatra said "truthin' in her song These Boots Are Made For Walking. Most people were surprised by this word. Some laughed.

[@upandawaygames]

How come we can sweeten or salt a dish, but not bittern or sour it? On the other hand, someone *can* sour a deal.

[@louisxvii2137]

Rick Heli -“How come we can?”- You don’t sweeten, bittern or sour a dish. You can sweeten you coffee or tea, but you add sugar, salt or pepper to a ‘dish’... or simply: _season_ it. to sour a deal is to spoil/ruin it while sweetening it is to make it more attractive but these are very specific to the context as it is a metaphorical expression.

[@PuddintameXYZ]

Well, there is the word embitter. That could work.

[@upandawaygames]

There are many citations referring to sweetening recipes. www.google.com/search?q=sweeten+a+recipe&oq=sweeten+a+recipe&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60l3j0.3153j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

[@ihanba]

Because bitterning a dish would turn it into poultry.

[@KettuKakku]

... So souring cake with lemon isn't proper English?

[@chienbanane3168]

"Wish I could, but I can't. Well, can, but won't. Should, maybe, but shorn't"

[@rafaelbrgnr]

You deserve a special thank you for use a beloved brazilian word, saudade. One of the most untranslatable words.

[@petroglyph888mcgregor2]

At 1:00, that is a drawing of King Richard III of England, right? According to the Shakespeare play (and other sources) he killed his own nephews. However, according to Josephine Tey (and some historians), it was King Henry VII who killed those boys.

[@TheInkPitOx]

We have a word for "the opposition to the separation of church and state". Antidisestablishmentarianism

[@somespeciesofpenguin]

😹 I'm dying right now...

[@solosunbeam]

There is a great word in Italian - Freddoloso/a - which is someone who feels the cold easily. I think English needs an equivalent.

[@KettuKakku]

Jon-Scot Burns Frigit? That could work? My sister's a frigit.

[@solosunbeam]

FennicYoshi maybe, maybe it's just too close to frigid. 😁😂

[@Ramk0core]

Oh nice, we have that one in spanish too, we say "friolento/a". The opposite would be a "caluroso/a".

[@zappawoman5183]

We just call those people Southerners.

[@lucabralia5125]

Ramk0core in Italian, caluroso is "Caloroso" Pretty similar

[@WaldirPimenta]

0:13 -- "Brazilians"? "Saudade" is a Portuguese word, nothing specific to Brazil, come on.

[@fusunhanim4217]

It means longing and it is translatable in soooo many languages!

[@hellbenderdesign]

What about spatulas? There are clearly two wildly different tools under that umbrella.

[@Aelsenaer]

Gezellig

[@avivastudios2311]

Lying and Truing. Ha, I never thought about how we never say that.

[@user-yc6vm5uj9y]

Trueing lol imma use that

[@fireriffs]

But there is a need for a word for nieces and nephews. Many of us have both nieces and nephews and are forced to clumsily say, "nieces and nephews" instead of having one simple word for it. Niblings doesn't cut it for me. Sounds like little bits of food. Get to work on this English! Make a word for aunt and uncle while you're at it.

[@64imma]

fireyf nibling sounds good to me

[@marlonmontelhiggins8570]

"Make a word for aunt and uncle while you're at it." I've read some time ago that there is a widely used gender-neutral word for aunt and uncle and that word is "pibling". Yeah. The English language needs a better word for that, too.

[@lucabralia5125]

In Italian we say "Nipoti" for nieces and nephews and "Zii" for aunts and uncles

[@lucabralia5125]

Nipote is singular, we don' specify if it's a male or a female Zio: uncle Zia: aunt

[@OntarioTrafficMan]

It is actively annoying that English lacks distinct words for one's two pairs of grandparents. "Grandma" could be two different people! I've often heard people address this issue by using words from different languages (e.g. "gran" and "oma") or in my case ("grandma" and "ammamma")

[@chad_bro_chill]

We do have terms for that, "maternal" and "paternal" grandparents. Obviously that's two words instead of one, but I can't really see any normal situation that would call for a singular word unless you actually lived with both sides of your family and need to address only one of them. Maternal/paternal is good enough for talking to strangers, and with family it's usually going to be clear from context or by just using their name.

[@OntarioTrafficMan]

@@chad_bro_chill Sure, but that's a lot more awkward than having a single word. I'm not going to say like "Have you heard from maternal grandma?" in real life. Meanwhile I abolutely say things like "Have you heard from ammama?".

[@Furienna]

In Swedish, it is the other way around. There's a word for your mother's mother and one for your father's mother, but we don't have one for both of them.

[@y.y3s.i.d081]

tâpwew is the word for “truthin” in cree. He tells the truth/tâpwew. kiyâskîskew/he lies

[@donnathespiv]

I shud kum up wiv mi own wurds.

[@vercingetorix3414]

Take the Irish (Gaelic) word "craic". Good times from conversations or gatherings. Or the German "gemutlicheit", similar connotation.

[@jahyamack8359]

Fuck, my entire recommend is filled to the brim with these videos. Shit, my first language is English too so these videos are quite useless. Still gonna keep watching them though.

[@dimadontsov7866]

Why isn't there a word for that? There are a lot of things it seems we should have a word for, but don't. We have parents, children, siblings. Why no word for all your nieces and nephews together? Brazilians have a word for the melancholy yearing for something or someone that you miss. Saudade. Why don't we? We have a verb for lying, and while we have phrases we can use, we don't have a single verb for telling the truth. Languages are full of holes like this. They are called lexical gaps, and they exist for various reasons. The main one being that languages are more likely to have words for concepts they need to refer to a lot. In cultures where it is important to keep track of the relative ages of family members, there will be more specific words for relatives. Mandarin has words for older brother, younger sister, older female cousin on mother's side. Ar one point English had the word patruel, for "child of a brother or paternal uncle". Why have a word for something so specific? It was important for succession. If your brothers and patruels were out of the picture, you could become king. So apparently, we haven't had much of a need for a simple term for nieces and nephews. But in cases where it might be important there are those who have been known to use the word niblings. Some lexical gaps between languages have todo with the general habits or grammar of a language. English has a tendency to put a lot of information about the manner in which an action was done in the verb itself. It might seem odd to speaker of languages like Spanish and French, that don't do tend to this, that we have words for "walk with difficulty", "jump on one foot", or "move like a snake". It seems strange to us that other languages express other qualities within single words.

[@hamiljohn]

honesty

[@asunagullo]

SLITHER- Reptar, culbrear. HOP- botar.

[@symbolxchannel]

I think I tend to invent words... Like the word "fanfarder" (in French, because I speak French...) which in English would be "to fanfard". For me, it means "to try to get attention by doing extravagant things"... In other words, it would mean to make extravagant things with a lot of pride in order to get noticed and maybe admired. Just like a fanfare... A veritable example of somebody who's "fanfarding" a lot is our prime minister, Justin Trudeau.

[@shalberus]

Yessss new vid

[@joeblowjo]

FUNNER IS A WORD!!!!!!!!

[@ObservingStuff]

Slang or ebonics fills in some of these gaps lol

[@rean_of_sonos9432]

LACUNAS!!!

[@DylanMatthewTurner]

Nieces and Nephews = Niblings!

[@Fajnybobr]

Ok so its literally just jargon. Theres lots of that in german hense the long ass words

[@tonyhall699]

I think you have to remember this is American English, or taken from an American view point.

[@OrlyYahalom]

Why doesn't English have single and plural versions of YOU ???

[@OntarioTrafficMan]

We used to: the singular informal was "thee/thou" while "you" was singular formal and plural. Same as "Tu" and "Vous" in modern French. One thing I think could help is to conjugate verbs differently depending on number. For example "you was" for one person, "you were" for multiple people. This is how Dutch resolves the confusion of "zij" meaning both "she" and "they"

[@OrlyYahalom]

@@OntarioTrafficMan or you can just use two different words :) I'm not "blaming" English for this, it just seems like a basic concept that can solve misunderstandings. Though I'd be very happy to have an equivalent word to "you" in my native language, Hebrew, in which "you" has 4 versions, and none of them is gender-neutral :(

[@OntarioTrafficMan]

@@OrlyYahalom Yes absolutely having two words would be better, but it's very difficult to get changes to the basic components of a language to catch on. This is why previous attempts at a new singular neuter third-person pronoun have failed. Instead the existing pronoun "they" has been expanded to include both singular and plural.

[@petroglyph888mcgregor2]

@@OrlyYahalom I use the word -- y'all -- as the plural form of "you". The word "y'all" is used by many people in "The South" (southeastern part of U.S.). I've never lived there, but since I'm fluent in English and Spanish, I've always thought it strange that standard English lacks a distinction between the singular and plural second person pronouns.