Miss K Kaif and I will often be talking about something when suddenly we'll hit a roadblock- a linguistic crater- an impassable trench- because for this particular story, at this particular point in the narrative, the English word just won't do. She proclaims:
Damn it! We have this word in Persian and it means like shiny, glistening and really super sparkling (insert Persian word).
And I will nod, as if I completely understand.
The truth is, I do. When you eat something funky, in Korean you say that you feel kipponuppah. A word that equates to feeling so badly gross, unhappy, like you want to cleanse your insides with Domestos, if only it wouldn't kill you. In English, you have to say at least ten different words to get the same effect.
Likewise in Persian they have an infinitely more colourful and precise vocabulary-- they even go as so far as to discriminate between silent farts and noisy farts: chosidam and goozidam respectively. Hilarious, huh? In Korean, we also have a bunch of words that mean fart: Pboong, bpahngu and podt (the last one may have been made up by my mum but I've definitely heard her say it before).
Why is English so comparatively boring? Maybe I just need to learn more words...
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