Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

This, in one form or another, is a subject that fascinates me endlessly.   In Spanish I used to beg my interlocuteurs to speak more slowly, using the word lento.   They understood me, but no, the proper word is despacio; lento is for a car going slowly, not a person speaking slowly.   I once was chatting with someone from Central America about my children, and gestured with my hand to show how big they were at the time.   She corrected me:   In her culture one holds the hand flat (as though to pat a the top of a child's head) only to show the height of pets or inanimate objects; for persons you hold you hand sideways, as though patting a cheek.   And they have two words for "to be", which takes Anglophones forever to get straight; but once you get the hang of it you realize that it's because there are two different concepts.

When my family moved south of the Mason-Dixon line, I was confused at first to discover that my new neighbors used the same word for both frogs and toads; they call them both "frogs".   In the Bible I occasionally see a footnote that makes it clear that Hebrew has just one word that refers to both scarlet and purple (so does that mean they thought of them as two shades of the same color?), and also a single word for both kids and lambs.   In classical Greek, the feet started not at the ankles but midway down the shin, and the hands midway between the elbow and the wrist.   (This, by the way, can eliminate the quarrel between those who insist that Jesus had nails through his "hands" and those who say historically it would have been his wrists.)   In Spanish they have just one word, limón, for both lemons and limes; they have, in effect, green limónes and yellow limónes.

The words we use affect how we think about things.   Without thinking about it we use "structure", "building", "edifice", "house" and many more, each in its own context and with slight variations in shades of meaning; but I'd quail at explaining the differences to someone just learning the language.

I once spent a frustrating and ultimately exhilarating half-hour trying to look up a word in a French dictionary.   (My French isn't that great, but it's good enough to have graduated, mostly, from French-English dictionaries to The Real Thing—but not always reliably, as I'm about to relate.)   The wind, this story told me, was whistling in the tuiles.   What's a tuile?   I went off to find out.   It's a covering used on bâtiments, often made of terre cuite.   A bâtiment would be some kind of boat (related to bateau), and terre is earth, but what is cuite?   Off to look up that word too...it looks like it has to do with cooking, or maybe more specifically baking.   No one cooks dirt, so it must be some other sense of terre; it could mean "earth" like the planet, or "dirt", or a farmer's field, or a lot in a housing development...but none of those made sense.   I finally gave up and looked up terre instead of guessing, but it was no help; it insisted it was just dirt.   Back to "cuite", and finally I noticed that it was the past participle of cuire; it still meant "cooked dirt", then, but somewhere along there came the realization that for "dirt" I could try reading "earth", or "clay", and "baked clay" made a good deal more sense.   I thought about about terre cuite and suddenly the light dawned ("ding ding ding ding ding!"):   TERRA COTTA!   (And now I know what "terra cotta" means in Italian, too.)

But what does terra cotta have to do with boats?   Back to bâtiment; maybe I'd misunderstood that word.   The French dictionary claimed it had nothing to do with boats at all, but was a kind of building, the sort that people use as habitations.   After a moment's thought I concluded it meant what we would call a "house".   But then the covering on the house...?   Again, ding ding ding ding ding!:   TILES!   It was a long time to work out a single word, but then it wasn't about reading the story in the first place, was it?; it was about learning a language better.