What do you call it when you’re homesick for a place you’ve never been? Is there a word for letting books pile up in your house without reading them? How about weather that looks beautiful out the window, but that you wouldn’t want to go out in? For this episode, we worked with Babbel to bring you our second annual Untranslatable Words challenge. In it, resident linguist Grace East pits the Twenty Thousand Hertz crew against each other in a hilarious and enlightening multilingual game show.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

MAXN - Shine Brightlyl
Guy Trevino and Friends - Thought You Knew Me
Stationary Sign - The Director
Stationary Sign - Granny’s Basement
“Question” sting from Stationary Sign - Do You Dare
Stationary Sign - Who’s the Boss Now?

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View Transcript ▶︎

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz. I’m Dallas Taylor.

[music in: MAXN - Shine Brightlyl]

As the creative director at my sound design studio, Defacto Sound, I often find myself using made-up words and phrases to get my ideas across. Like “cerebral sparklies into an airy release…”

[sfx: cerebral sparkles into an airy release]

Or bitcrushed flitter reverse suck dropout into a pit of despair. [sfx: bitcrushed flitter reverse suck dropout into a pit of despair] or veri-fi ramp the music to continue my thoughts…**

[continue music: Veri-fi ramp up]

But while I often end up feeling a little ridiculous, the sound design team knows exactly what I mean. For everything else, I’m lucky enough to work with a linguistic expert.

Grace: My name is Grace East, and I am a producer at Defacto Sound and Twenty Thousand Hertz.

Grace is the one who interacts with our clients all day. And recently, she completed her PhD in linguistics.

Grace: So, I lived in West Africa for a while doing field research. And I also wrote a whole dissertation about this particular community that I lived in, in Ghana, and the way that they use language.

Last year, Grace came up with a great idea for a game show episode called the Untranslatable Words Challenge. In the game, Grace reads words from other languages that don’t have a direct translation in English. Then, our producers and I have to guess what they mean.

Grace: Language is one of the most important ways that we can know each other. So I wanted to put together a quiz to show people how fun and fascinating language is, but also to demonstrate the wealth of knowledge in someone else's head who lives across the world, has a completely different life experience, and speaks a completely different language than you.

Grace: And so I think it is a meditation on just how alike humans are. We often go to extra lengths to point out our differences, and I think that we're actually all much more similar than we realize.

Last time we did this, we had so much fun, and I knew I wanted to do it again. Plus, our producer Andrew beat me last time, and I wanted a chance to redeem myself.

So without further ado, let the games begin.

[music in: Guy Trevino and Friends - Thought You Knew Me]

[sfx: studio applause]

Announcer: Hello and welcome to the second annual Untranslatable Word Challenge. In this lexicontest, [sfx: laughter] players compete to guess the meaning of foreign words that have no direct translation in English.

Announcer: Today's game will be hosted by the Sorceress of Syntax, Producer Grace East.

[sfx: applause up]

Announcer: Now, let's meet our players. Contestant number one is a wizard of word and song alike, producer Andrew Anderson.

[sfx: applause up + british shouting that AA recorded]

Announcer: Contestant number two is a cinephile from the City of Roses, supervising producer Casey Emmerling.

[sfx: applause up]

Announcer: Contestant number three is the sage of sound waves and the host of Twenty Thousand Hertz, Dallas Taylor.

[sfx: applause]

Announcer: Alright Grace, take it away.

Grace: I'm very excited that you all wanted to do this again, and I have a whole new slate of words, along with a very quick linguistics lesson that I wanted to start out with.

Grace: So, I wanted to ask everybody, what is a word?

Casey: Um, it's a sound that humans produce that carries meaning.

Grace: Amazing! Casey, it's like you're a linguist. I love it.

Grace: So words can indeed be sounds, but they can also be written or signed. You can kinda think of them as just, like little succinct packages of meaning. Language speakers can usually intuitively tell what makes a word in their given language. But a general definition is actually pretty hotly contested among linguists um just because languages just vary so broadly.

[music in: Stationary Sign - The Director]

Grace: But with that in mind I wanted to just share a couple cool ways that humans make words.

Grace: One way that we do this is through a process called coinage. Um, these are what are called “neologisms,” which is just a fancy way of saying totally new words. So, a couple of my favorite recent ones are, of internet fame, “yeet,” which was popularized on Vine [RIP] and YouTube... “Cheugy,” which is a great Gen-Z term, and of course “zhuzh,” which means like “to spice something up, or make it a little nicer.”

Casey: I'm a big zhuzh guy.

Grace: Yeah zhuzh is great. There are such a huge variety of ways that we make new words as people. We can compound them, so like breakfast or airplane or dollhouse. Um, we can abbreviate them, or make acronyms words, like scuba, which is Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus.

Andrew: No way! I never knew that!

Grace: Yeah! We blend words all the time, so “smog” is “smoke” plus “fog.” “Hangry” is one of my recent favorite inventions, which is “hungry” and “angry.” And these are also called portmanteaus, which is a French word uh meaning a suitcase with two compartments. So it basically means that you take two bits of words and smush them together.

Casey: When I was in college, we had an assignment in one of my poetry classes to come up with our own portmanteau, and so I came up with, “Withdrowskis,” which is uh, the condition that afflicts you when it's been too long since you've watched The Big Lebowski. You're going through withdrowskis.

Grace: Withdrow—! Okay, that's officially in the Defacto/Twenty Thousand Hertz dictionary.

Grace: So that brings us to today. And a major way that we get new words is from borrowing from other languages. So we have, “ennui” from French, which is the sort of, like, existential boredom that you might experience. We get “karaoke” from Japanese, we get “kindergarten” from German.

[music in: Stationary Sign - Granny’s Basement]

Grace: So today, we're going to take a little spin down the Untranslatable Words road and see how many you all can correctly identify. What I'll do is read the mystery word as well as the language it belongs to. And then you'll guess the definition based on three choices.

Grace: Each choice is another real definition from a different Untranslatable Word, which I'll reveal after the correct answer has been given. We have six words, and each correct guess is worth five points, for a possible total of thirty.

Grace: Alright, Let's go.

[sfx: “Question” sting from Stationary Sign - Do You Dare]

Grace: Word one is “lul.” Lul comes from Finnish. Does it mean A, “a type of vicarious joy someone feels when basking in other people's joy or well being,” B, “the steam that rises from the coals of a sauna after you toss water on it,” or C, “accepting someone's hospitality graciously so as not to offend?”

[music in: Stationary Sign - Who’s the Boss Now?]

Andrew: I mean, the logical one has to be the sauna, right?

Casey: I think it might be a trick though. I'm going to go C, because I think the first answer is like meant to trick us into thinking of “LOL.” And the second answer is meant to trick us into thinking of Scandinavia and steam, sauna stuff. So I'm going C.

It's C because that is a word that I don't have that would be extremely valuable.

Grace: So, you all gave me way more credit for being clever in putting this quiz together. And the correct answer is B, [sfx: “Answer” sting + applause] “the steam that rises from the coals of a sauna.”

Andrew: They love saunas. There's even like a sauna world championship, I don't know if you've ever seen that. So It's basically how long you can stay in the sauna.

Grace: What?

Andrew: Like in one of the ones a couple of years back, they were in so long, they just had to end the competition. ‘Cause they were like, “Look, you've not eaten or gone to the toilet or anything forever. We have to stop this before one of you drops dead.”

Grace: I love it. This is what I love about it. It's like it makes us think about and talk about all this like fun, cool stuff.

Grace: So A, “the type of vicarious joy someone feels when, like enjoying another person's joy” is “mudita,” and it is from Sanskrit, which is a classical language of South Asia. It's the sacred language of Hinduism, but also used in Buddhist texts.

Grace: And then letter C, “accepting someone's hospitality graciously, mostly so you don't offend the host” is called “tarof,” and that is from Persian, spoken in Iran. And I found in my research that it can also extend to folks in the service industry who might actually refuse payment the first few times you offer. And so you have to make sure if you're ever visiting Iran to keep offering until they accept.

Casey: Oh wow.

Grace: Yeah or otherwise, they might… You know, if you're like, “Oh, well, well, thanks!” they might be like, “Wait, what?”

This reminds me a bit of when I go to get coffee with a friend and there's that inevitable “Who's gonna pay?” thing. “Oh, I'll get this.” “No, you don't have to.” “No, I want to.” And then, so I have like a two demand rule, if someone else says, “I'm going to pay for it,” I go, “No, you don't have to do that,” and they say, “No, I want to,” I say, “Okay, you said it twice. You shall now pay.”

Casey: I think that's a good method. You don't want to go back and forth too many times.

Andrew: Yeah, you can get into a young couple’s, “No, you hang up!” situation otherwise, can't you, so, that's no good.

Grace: “No you pay.” Alright, so Andrew's in the lead with five. Are we ready for word two?

Andrew: Yes.

Casey: Let's do it.

[sfx: sting from Stationary Sign - Do You Dare]

Grace: Word two is “tsarta.” Tsarta is Hausa, which is a language of Nigeria and West Africa more broadly. Also the language that I wrote my dissertation about.

Grace: Does tsarta mean, A, “to spit out water in a thin stream between your teeth,” B, “the little, “ahem,” noise you make to clear your throat before saying something,” or C, “the giddy rush you get when someone makes a romantic gesture, sort of like getting butterflies in your stomach?”

[music in: Stationary Sign - Who’s the Boss Now?]

I feel like I would just want to just say C on all of them, uh, like I'm taking a test.

Andrew: I think, isn't that what you did, last time, I seem to recall, and it worked out in the end? Like, it went badly at first, and then you caught back up, yeah.

Casey: I'm gonna go with A, “spitting water between your teeth.” Not for any valid reason other than I'm just hoping that that's a common enough occurrence there, uh, maybe culturally or societally that they needed a word for it.

Andrew: Exact same thought. I'm hoping it's, uh, it's that.

[music fades under]

Grace: Awesome. Okay, so we've got two for A, “to spit out water,” and one for C, “the giddy rush you get, like butterflies in your stomach.”

Grace: Okay, the correct answer is A, [sfx: "Answer" sting + applause] “to spit out water in a thin stream between your teeth.”

Andrew: Woop woop! C's coming back, Dallas. Don't worry.

Grace: C, yeah, C will C will have its time, I promise.

It hasn't been C twice, so it's gotta be the next one.

Grace: And what I love about this is I have a hunch that it's onomatopoetic, because if you kind of go [noise], I imagine that it's like shooting the water between your teeth. I actually included a second one that I thought was like semi-related, which is also in Hausa, it's “wuxidia,” and it means “the natural gap that forms between, your front two teeth.”

Andrew: In British culture, if you're “gat toothed, G-A-T, it's considered a sign of wisdom and charm. There's a poem called “Gat Toothed Was She,” in fact.

Casey: Absorbent and yellow and gat-toothed was she.

Andrew: So beautiful.

Grace: Um… So tsarta is “to spit out water in a thin stream between your teeth.” Um, “the little ‘ahem’ noise that you make before you, uh, say something” is a Swedish word. It's “harkla.” And then “the giddy rush you get when someone makes a romantic gesture,” we would probably say like “getting butterflies,” is Tagalog, spoken in the Philippines, and that is the word “kilig.”

Grace: So I did a little research here, the closest word I could find to this in English was “twitterpated.” And I almost didn't include it because that is a translation. However, when I dug deeper, I found that it was actually invented in the film Bambi in 1942. It's used by the character Friend Owl.

Friend Owl: Nearly everybody gets twitterpated in the springtime.

Grace: I love it. That puts us at Andrew with 10, Casey with 5. Dallas, not yet any points, but there's still time. Come on, letter C.

[sfx: sting from Stationary Sign - Do You Dare]

Grace: Our next word is “fernweh.” It's from, uh, German. Does fernweh mean, A, “a feeling like homesickness for a place you've never been, but one that's very far from wherever you are now,” B, “weather that only looks beautiful from the window, but that you wouldn't actually want to go out in,” or C, “one's social network, based on a series of reciprocal favors and exchanges?”

[music in: Stationary Sign - Who’s the Boss Now?]

Andrew: I'm gonna go B.

Grace: Okay, “weather.”

Casey: I'm gonna go A.

Grace: Okay, Casey’s going A.

Andrew: Wonder what Dallas will go?

You know, my instinct is to go with one of what Andrew or Casey did to where I can get some points, but I'm gonna go with C.

Grace: Okay, so we have one for each, is that right? We've got Casey with A, Andrew with B, Dallas with C.

Mmhmm.

Grace: The correct answer is A, [sfx: "Answer" sting + applause] “a feeling of homesickness for a place you've never been.”

Casey: Ohhh yeaaah.

Grace: Pow pow pow pow! So I thought this was particularly cool because there's another German word that you might be familiar with, which is “wanderlust.” But wanderlust has a much more, like, active desire quality, whereas “ferenvet” is, like, “a longing for something that's, like, missing in your life.”

Casey: It's just like sitting on Airbnb and looking at the exotic, amazing places that you could stay in theory, but you never will.

Grace: A hundred percent. It's like, all of my, like, Instagram algorithm is like, “You could buy this Italian cottage for 60,000 dollars.” That kind of thing.

Grace: But German has, like, such a great way of capturing complex emotional words, or complex emotional feelings in words. Like, we get the word “angst” from German. We also get “Schadenfreude,” which is one of the probably best known German loans.

Grace: And so, “the weather that only looks nice from the window but that you wouldn't want to go out in” is the Icelandic word “glugaveðr” And, it's a compound word with “window” and “weather,” so “window weather.”

Grace: And then the social network is Mandarin Chinese, and that word is “guanxi.” And guanxi is pretty widespread, like, cultural phenomenon, in a lot of parts of China, especially with business relationships. It's, like, a pretty important, long standing reciprocal relationship that you have with your, uh, business partners.

[music in: Guy Trevino and Friends - Thought You Knew Me]

Announcer: And with that, Casey and Andrew are neck and neck with 10 points apiece [applause]. Will one of them bring home the victory, or will Dallas pull off a surprise comeback? We’ll find out after a word from our sponsor.

MIDROLL

[music in: Guy Trevino and Friends - Thought You Knew Me]

Announcer: We now return to the Untranslatable Word Challenge.

Grace: Alright, are we ready for word four?

Andrew: We're ready.

Casey: Let's do it.

[sfx: sting from Stationary Sign - Do You Dare]

Grace: So word four is “Ubuntu.” It comes from, um, a couple different languages That are closely related in South Africa. Uh, Zulu, Ndebele, and Xhosa among a couple.

Grace: Does Ubuntu mean A, “a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery, sort of like an existential crisis,” B, “a seemingly effortless cool or nonchalance,” or C, “a sense of responsibility and interconnectedness with one's community and environment?”

[music in: Stationary Sign - Who’s the Boss Now?]

Andrew: Isn't it been adopted as the name of like a operating system and programming language? Ubuntu?

Casey: Ooh, yes, and with that in mind, I'm going to go with C.

Here's the problem, I want to do C because that's what it feels like to me, but then it's just, if I didn't do C and it turns out to be C, that'll be even more embarrassing. And there's no way it would be A and B this entire time without a C at some point. This would be obnoxiously long before a C.

Andrew: But it's going to be ruined by the fact we're all going with C now Dallas, so you won't get the benefit.

Now I want to go with B, just to see what happens. I’m gonna go with B.

Grace: Okay.

Casey: Oooh.

Grace: Okay, so we have two, Casey, Andrew, are C, Dallas is B. Okay, Dallas, really hate to say this, but the correct answer was C. [sfx: "Answer" sting + applause]

Andrew: Hee. Oh no!

Grace: Oh my gosh. Okay, so, the other two words, um, that were not “Ubuntu:” Letter A, which was “a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery, sort of like an existential crisis,” is a Czech word, “litost”, and the term was first popularized outside of the Czech language by Milan Kundira, who's a Czech/French author who used litost as a concept in one of his books.

Grace: And then letter B might be one of my favorites in the quiz. It is, “the seemingly effortless cool or nonchalance.” It's Italian, and it's “sprezzatura.”

Casey: Sprezzatura.

Grace: Isn't that great? It's just so fun. So sprezzatura originated in Renaissance literature of all things, and it aims to teach noblemen how to cultivate a sort of effortless or unrehearsed elegance. So basically the, uh, you know, disheveled hair look of the Renaissance era, essentially.

Casey: I want to go through a Renaissance-era Italian cool training course and see how I end up.

Andrew: The problem is, if it turns out that those things are deeply uncool now, and then, um, you know.

Grace: Right.

Andrew: Cool keeps moving on just like language.

Casey: But “cool” sticks around. The word. “Cool” is still cool. It's like one of the oldest slang terms, I feel like, that we still use.

Grace: Yeah.

[sfx: sting from Stationary Sign - Do You Dare]

Grace: Alright, word five is “cafuné.” It is Brazilian Portuguese. Does it mean A, “a state in between two extremes, or just right?” B, “the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials, but letting them pile up in one's home without actually reading them,” or C, “caressing the hair of a loved one.” [music in: Stationary Sign - Who’s the Boss Now?]

Andrew: Hmm.

Caffounet is a gorgeous sounding word, so it's gotta be A or C, but I'm gonna go with A.

Andrew: I'm also going A. The reason being, there was a Brazilian footballer called “Cafu,’ and I wonder like, that quite describes him as a player.

Grace: Oh, cool.

Casey: Well, I think those arguments are plausible, but just to go in a different direction, I'm gonna go with C, “caressing the hair.”

Grace: All right. Okay, so we've got Andrew and Dallas with A and Casey with C. Is that right?

Andrew: That's right.

Grace: Okay. The correct answer is C, [sfx: "Answer" sting + applause] “Caressing the hair of a loved one.”

Casey: Oh yeah!

I’m ending this with zero points!

Grace: So yeah, the correct answer was “caressing the hair of a loved one,” um, and what I wanted to share about this one that was super cool is it's potentially derived from an Angolan language, called Kimbundu, and it's rumored to have been brought to Brazil by enslaved people, and this is actually where we get a lot of words, um, like, “Samba” is also a word that was brought from Kimbundu, and many African languages like Yoruba and Kikongo were actually hugely influential on Brazilian Portuguese, too.

Grace: And there's a potential for the term “kafune” being carried over because it was a way for people to continue to humanize each other in otherwise, like, unimaginable circumstances. So to like, continue to lovingly caress someone's hair was a way to remind people of their humanity, which I thought was, like, incredible.

I'm glad that it was a, it was a clearly like a beautiful sounding word, and it had to mean something beautiful.

Grace: Right? Yeah. Yeah, that was a, a very good theory, Dallas. I agree.

Grace: So letter A, which, which you and Andrew, um, chose, is a Swedish word, “lagom,” and it means “just right,” and it can refer to, either like, “the perfect fit of, pants or something like that,” but it also can continue all the way up to, like, “a life philosophy of not becoming too successful or, like, failing miserably,” so sort of just like, the middle path of just kind of living your life just right.”

Casey: The Goldilocks philosophy.

Grace: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And then letter B comes from Japanese, and that word is “sundoku,” and that is the phenomenon of letting books stack up without reading them, which is something I'm super guilty of.

Andrew: Same.

Grace: There's something comforting and cozy about it.

Andrew: I have so many books that we realized we'd accidentally started selling them in the bookshop because they'd over spilled from my area of storing them. ‘Cause the listeners that don't know, I have a bookshop, and they'd accidentally spread into the shop itself and started being sold by mistake. So…

Grace: Oh no!

Casey: Well, that's convenient that you have too many books and a bookshop.

Andrew: Yeah, yeah, It could have, you know, if it had been like a cafe and there was just books and the food, I would have been in much bigger trouble.

Grace: “Waiter, there's a book in my soup!” Alright, we have our final word if everyone is ready.

Casey: Let’s do it.

Andrew: We’re ready.

[sfx: sting from Stationary Sign - Do You Dare]

Grace: The word is “mamila pinatapayi.” It is a Yagin word, which is spoken, um, or was spoken in Tierra del Fuego. Tierra del Fuego means “Land of Fire,” and it is an archipelago off the southernmost tip of South America. So we're talking, like southern Argentina or Chile.

Grace: So, Mamila Pinatapayi, does it mean, A, “a lucky find, something wonderful found by pure happenstance,” B, “a pace of life that's so crazy that it demands a new way of living,” or “a life out of balance,” or C, “a look wordlessly shared by two people who want to initiate something, but both are hesitant or hoping the other person will do it?”

[music in: Stationary Sign - Who’s the Boss Now?]

So, it seems to me like “Lucky Find” would be what it was. So I'm gonna go with A.

Casey: I'm gonna go C, just because it's a really long word for a fairly complex idea, whereas “lucky find” to me sounds like a simple thing that maybe you would express with a shorter word.

Andrew: I'm gonna go B just so that then we've got one of each and that way there can’t be a… It gives me the chance to catch up.

Grace: Alright, so we've got one for A, one for B, one for C. [sfx: drumroll] The correct answer, for the win is [sfx: crash] Casey with letter [sfx: “Answer” sting] C. Bravo!

[applause]

Grace: All right. So that means, Casey wins with 25.

Andrew: Congratulations, Casey.

Congratulations.

Casey: Why, thank you, thank you.

Grace: Andrew, very honorable second with 15. And Dallas, you get an honor point of one for your incredible definitional skills. Um, do we want to hear the words for the other two?

Casey: Of course.

Yeah.

Andrew: Yes please.

Grace: Okay, awesome. So, A, “a lucky find,” is the French word “trouver.” Um, and what's cool about this one Is if you just Google, translate it it'll just say “to find.” But there's this like much deeper meaning that implies that it's sort of like “a lucky find,” or like “a rare occurrence,” which I thought was really cool.

Grace: And then B, was, um, “a pace of life that's like, so crazy and unbalanced that it demands a new way of living,” comes to us from Hopi, which is an indigenous community, in the southwestern U.S., and the word is “Koyaanisqatsi,” um, and—

I saw that movie!

Grace: Yeah, so it's the title of uh, yeah, a documentary. And then, Philip Glass, Ira Glass's cousin, weirdly enough, composed the—

Casey: What? I did not know that.

Grace: Yeah, they have like a uh, an audio arts, like regime. But yeah, so Philip Glass also composed a track for the film by the same name as well.

Grace: So to end, I wanted to ask what experience or emotion do you wish that we had in English? Or which of these words are you going to take with you and use?

Casey: I actually did think of one, which is, I have thought about how, when we're cold, we say “brrrr.” You know, you go into a cold room and you're like, “Brrr!” But there's no, little onomatopoeia sound word like that for when it's too hot. So, I've come up with “flerm” which my girlfriend and I will say sometimes. Like, “Flerm! It's so hot in here!”

Grace: Wait, I love this. That's great.

The biggest takeaway that I have from this quiz is, I was unaware of how much our language shows a long lineage of like, ancestry that comes from all over the world. It's so easy to hear that, “Oh, wait, like all of it has this deep tentacle back to some other place.” And our language itself is a melting pot here, of all of these people that have come that have come from all over the world to this country.

Andrew: Can I make a much less profound statement?

Grace: Of course.

Andrew: I would like a word, and tell me if this already exists, when your child wakes you up at, like, 6:30, 7 in the morning, it's not time to get up for another hour yet. They're kind of making cute sounds, but at the same time, they woke you up. So you both hate them and love them at the same. What’s the word for that?

You love them more than anything you've ever loved in your life, but you're extremely annoyed at this moment. I need that word.

Announcer: And that concludes the Untranslatable Word Challenge. We hope this episode gave you some mudita. Bye bye now.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. Find out more at Defacto Sound dot com.

Other Voices: This episode was produced by Grace East, with help from Andrew Anderson and Casey Emmerling. It was sound designed and mixed by Colin Devarney.

Thanks to voice artist Jay Smack for his outstanding game show announcer voice.

I’m Dallas Taylor. Thanks for listening.