Abbiocco

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, hi, this is Joshua Rowe from Jacksonville, Florida.

Hi, Josh. Welcome to the show.

I was younger, my fit and friendly 20s. I did a lot of traveling around in Europe and things like that. And overseas, they have words for a lot of things that you just don’t have translations for in American English.

And for example, the word abyo-ko is that real tired feeling you get after you eat a big meal or something. And since being back, I have found another word called yugen, which is this really cool feeling that deep and mysterious, almost like profound beauty you have. A sense that you have whenever you’re watching a sunset or you’re reading poetry, something like that.

And I always wondered if there were any words in, like, make American English or things kind of like those that you could use to explain. And maybe you guys would have any kind of great ideas for those.

Well, let’s back up a second. You used the word abbioco.

Yes, not only slang, but that was one of the words that kind of stuck with me because, you know, I feel like that all the time. In Italy. You’re reminding me of I was once in Venice and had a nine-course meal that had asparagus in every single course because it was asparagus season. And afterward, there really was this sense of abbioco, as you say.

Talk about un pasta rico e abundante. A rich and abundant meal. Yeah, it’s that feeling of being really full and satiated and just sort of drowsy, right?

Yeah. Yeah, like not falling asleep, drowsy, but just kind of that pushing back from the table. There’s actually a fun word in Dutch, outbalken, which means to sit back and relax after dinner. And it comes from words that mean belly out, which is kind of the same thing. You know, you loosen your belt.

So abjoko and outbalken. What I think is so cool about that word is that it just is so evocative, right? I’m sure any time you hear that word or have that sensation, you now reach for that word.

Yeah, it does. It’s really all together and just saying it kind of as such a round word, if you will. It’s almost like a belly, you know, a bioco. It feels like a mouthful and a stomachful at the same time.

Yeah, it’s interesting. In English, I don’t know that, Grant, we have anything like that. We say, I’m full or I’m sufficiently suficient. It’s not a single word.

Right, that’s what I’m saying. There’s nothing perfect about a single word. Multiple words can do the job just as well, but for some reason we gravitate to single words.

Exactly. We can say postprandial drowsiness. That means a sleepiness that comes after your meal. Right, but I think what Josh is saying is that there’s something so delicious about packing all of that into a single word.

Right. You really get a feeling, right? Right, and it’s kind of got these markers on it for him for a time and a place and a moment of his life. And it’s wrapped up in the experience. It’s more than just the word. It’s about where he was and who he was with and what he was doing and what his life was about at the time. So it’s a suitcase that contains many other things other than there’s more than a meaning there. A backpack, if you will. A backpack, perfect.

There’s a reason that English is often criticized by other languages for intruding upon their languages and loaning out its words willy nilly. Because English often has concepts that are harder to explain or are longer to explain.

Weekend, for example, borrowed into numerous European languages is a single word for end of the week. So we have words that other countries really like, and we just think of as ordinary. It can work both ways.

And we might look at these other words in these other languages as interesting and useful or exotic or just lovely. And they might say, well, yeah, it’s just an ordinary word. I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Josh, if you want to get more of this experience of just feeling like you’ve learned a word that you can savor, there are two books that I want to recommend to you. One of them is The Book of Human Emotions by Tiffany Watt Smith, just loaded with lots of lovely writing about how we feel and the words we use both in English and other languages for our feelings.

And the other one is a book by Tim Lomas, that’s L-O-M-A-S, Translating Happiness, A Cross-Cultural Lexicon of Well-Being. Again, he has looked at lots of languages around the world and found the ways that these languages think about happiness and talk about happiness. And it’s interesting to see that these words are tied into cultural concepts. They’re not necessarily word-for-word translations and can’t be.

So there’s a lot more to say than just A equals B. So sometimes it’s A equals a paragraph or A equals a page. So a lot of these books are very good. We’ll link to these on the show notes for the episode.

Excellent. No, thank you. Josh, thank you for sharing your memories and reminding me and reminding us how important it is to get out there, see the world, and learn a little bit of every language, just as much as you can gather.

Yeah, thank you very much. I appreciate it. It was a great experience, and hopefully my kids will be able to do that the same one day.

Thanks, Josh. Bye-bye.

We know there are stories about the words in your life. Call us, and we’ll share those stories with each other. 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.