Ben in Sydney, Australia, writes with a suggestion for a word describing that feeling you get upon discovering that your favorite restaurant has closed. He calls it noshtalgia, and shares a touching story about his own experience with it. Noshtalgia, he says, is a combination of nosh, meaning to eat, and nostalgia, from Greek words that literally mean return home pain. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Noshtalgia”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
A few weeks ago, we had a discussion about the need for a word for that feeling that you get when your favorite restaurant closes.
Oh, yeah.
And we got some good suggestions, like melancholy.
Oh, nice.
But I think we have a winner.
Oh.
And it comes from Ben Hurley, who lives in Arncliffe, which is a suburb of Sydney, Australia.
And Ben says it has to be nostalgia.
Nosh, N-O-S-H-talgia, like nostalgia plus nosh?
Yeah, using the alge, which means pain.
And he says it’s the pain of remembering all those great meals that will never be served again.
All those great noshes.
Yeah.
And he also shared this story of his own experience.
He wrote, there was once a little Italian restaurant on Stanley Street, Darlinghurst, called No Names.
As a kid, I lived in a rural town, and when we visited Sydney, my parents would take me and my two younger siblings to No Names.
It was a tiny space on the first floor of Terrace. It was utterly basic.
The menu consisted of primo and secundo. Primo was spaghetti bolognese.
I think secundo was Neapolitan ice cream.
All meals were served with thick slabs of white ciabatta bread and thick glass tumblers of weak orange cordial.
There was a salad consisting of plain lettuce leaves and white vinegar.
As a kid, I dipped my bread in the cordial.
As an adult, I dipped it in the vinegar at the bottom of the salad bowl.
Seventeen years ago, No Names was where my brother proposed to his wife.
One month ago, I tried to take my kids there with my brother and his kids, and it was gone.
No Names, no more.
In its place now is a pokey-looking nightclub with cliché flashing lights.
Nostalgia.
Oh, yeah, that’s so often how it is.
Isn’t it?
I just thought that was such a great description of loving a place that’s very simple.
And what it means to you as a kid and then going back as an adult, and then it’s gone.
There’s another kind of feeling you have, though, when you go back to a place that you loved,
And it doesn’t match your memory.
Oh, gosh, yes.
It’s not as grand as you thought.
It’s run down.
Right.
Perhaps it hasn’t been kept up or it was never that great.
You just don’t remember the bad things about it.
Oh, yeah.
That’s a different kind of nostalgia where you’re like, was this food this bland the last time I was here?
Was this menu this terrible?
Yeah, was this place so pokey, which is a word that means cramped.
I had to look that up.
We love language related to food.
You might have picked up on that.
But we’ll take language questions on anything, 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.
Thank you.
