No word is truly untranslatable — you can always explain it in a sentence. What these words offer is compression: a single term for something English needs a paragraph to…
Some words carry a location inside them. A city that made a fabric, a port that shipped a wine, an island that lent its name to a shape — the…
The fear of not speaking the language stops a lot of people from going places they would love. In practice, communication is far more robust than we assume, and most…
Words that come from people's names are called eponyms, and English is full of them. Most of the time we use them without any sense that there was once an…
English has a reputation, only half-joking, for following other languages down dark alleys and rifling through their pockets for loose vocabulary. It is a language built almost entirely out of…