Joshua from Jacksonville, Florida, has fond memories of long dinners in Italy that left him with a sense of abbiocco, an Italian word for “that drowsy, full feeling after a satisfying meal.” The Dutch word uitbuiken means “to sit back and relax after dinner,” connoting the idea of comfortably pushing away from the table and perhaps loosening one’s belt. Joshua is also a fan of the Japanese word yugen, sometimes translated as “a feeling of profound and mysterious beauty.” For further reading about feelings in various languages, check out The Book of Human Emotions by Tiffany Watt Smith (Bookshop|Amazon) and Translating Happiness: A Cross-Cultural Lexicon of Well-Being by Tim Lomas (Bookshop|Amazon). This is part of a complete episode.
After our conversation about towns with extremely short names, many listeners wrote to tell us about Why, Arizona. Others pointed out that there are towns called Ely in Iowa, Minnesota, and Nevada. Other super-short appellations include Rye, New...
Debbie from Crawfordsville, Florida, says that when she and her husband reach an impasse while working on something, they’ll say Let’s grok about it, which they use to mean “Let’s think about it.” Grok was coined by...
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