Language Does More: When There Are No Words
I keep a list of things there isn’t a word for in English. It’s probably a side effect of being a linguist, and it’s definitely one of my go-tos when I play two truths and a lie. Here are some examples on my list:
To make someone else jealous (like “angering” or “saddening” but for jealousy)
To have something stuck in your teeth
Slippery like gravel rather than slippery like ice
To wave back at someone who’s actually waving at someone behind you
Horizontal but frontways rather than sideways (it would really help when moving a sofa!)
To blow your nose
To have a sneeze that won’t come
To almost sneeze but it goes away (see also Calvin & Hobbes)
When you drop something and it disappears because it landed somewhere that you swear is impossible
When you play media on speaker and you think it’s on your headphones
When your device autocorrects you but you were right the first time
A thing that there isn’t a word for
I have candidate words in mind that I could nominate for each of these meanings. But it’s not really important whether we make up the verb “to jealous” or “to envify” or whatever. What I’m getting at is how funny it is that this basic idea doesn’t have a word in English.
Whenever I mention one of these unwords, somebody shares a well-worn idea in response: there’s probably a word for that in German. Or Japanese. Or Danish. From "Schadenfreude" to “wabi sabi” to “hygge,” there’s a whole beautiful world of words out there – beyond English. The idea is that English just doesn’t cut it.
But that misses something important. Every language has its own way of dividing up the conceptual and perceptual world into words. A solid analogy is the night sky: different societies drew different constellations even when they were looking at the same stars.
This sense that English is lacking in some way goes way back. It was evident in a young America that saw itself as inferior to Great Britain – language was lumped in with a variety of cultural markers of backwaterdom. Linguists Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes call this “the linguistic inferiority principle.” That came out of research on African American Vernacular English, or Black English, which is just as consistent and systematic and effective as any other dialect of English. Linguists have a general word for languages and dialects taken together: lects. All lects have their own rules, and they all have things that others don’t.
After all, French doesn’t have an equivalent for “people-pleaser,” so it recently borrowed the word outright (just look at people trying to work around it here, and here, or here). Nor did Russia have its own word for “computer” until it copied us with “kompyuter.” And our word “flirt” has no direct translation in German, Japanese, or Danish – so all three are flirting with borrowing it. Why give English such short shrift? The grass is always greener on the other side of the lect.
Knowing the differences between languages is like seeing out of two eyes. It gives you depth perception. You wouldn’t have that depth perception with only one eye whether it was your right or your left. And you’ll only see so much with one language whether it’s English or Swahili. The more you learn about another language, the deeper the world looks to you.
Now, I find it quietly heartbreaking that English doesn’t have a word for the ideas above. But I’d be the first to admit that we don’t really need one. That’s the whole miracle of language: you can use it to convey any idea, even where you have no word for it. Language contains infintities. The tradeoff is just that it takes longer to express than if it were one word.
And that can be a beautiful thing. Have you ever read a book where the narrator describes a scenario so familiar to you that you get chills? (Some authors do it better than others.) I’ve long thought that the very best works of art – from kids books to artsy films – convey a meaning so peculiar and potent that there can be no words. We need the whole artwork to convey the meaning.
Indeed, having a word for something doesn’t necessarily mean you think that much about it. It can be like paving a direct road through a park: more convenient, less beautiful. There’s no monolithic, predetermined impact. There are lots of smaller impacts.
Just because it’s not a word, that doesn’t mean it’s not a thing.