I know exactly what I mean. I just can’t think of the word for it

Wednesday, 16th January 2008

Matthew Parris's missing words

A friend, for instance, once told me there’s an excellent Yiddish word to denote, in a woman, a combination of limited intellect with instinctive guile: ‘a stupid but cunning woman’ would be the longhand, and though in English the two halves of the conjunction seem logically at odds with each other, we can at once see (can’t we?) the human type to which this refers. It needs a word, and though I’m unable to confirm that the Yiddish one exists, it should; and my attempts to track it down, however unsuccessful, have given me a sniff of a marvellous language which seems to abound in expressions you didn’t know you needed until you saw them. ‘Doppess’, apparently, means ‘a uselessly commiserating bystander’.

In my childhood in Africa I learned a Chishona word for that heavy, falling, gently soaking, soft, soft mountain mist that wetly caresses your face, and isn’t quite fog and isn’t quite drizzle: ‘guti’ — a lovely and useful expression for which there is no English equivalent. And (from my African boyhood too) the Afrikaans word ‘lekker’, though translatable into English as ‘nice/good/great/tasty’, conveys so much more of the intended lick-smacking quality than any of those English words.

Fifty years later, in my four-month sojourn among the French in the sub-Antarctic eight years ago, I was surprised to learn that that indispensable English word ‘shy’ is almost impossible to translate accurately and sensitively into French. My friends in Kerguelen told me that ‘timide’ was the word I was looking for, but that term is also used for ‘fearful’ or even ‘cowardly’; whereas ‘shy’, which is quite an affectionate expression in English, has no such connotations. You can be both brave and shy in English. Perhaps I have been misinformed and there does exist a French adjective for that winning human quality of social diffidence: an adjective carrying no suggestion of pusillanimity. If so, I never heard it.

No doubt there are French words we could usefully do with in our own tongue, yet cannot simply translate (though we have tended simply to incorporate these); sympathique is often cited as an example and we are conscious of its loss in translation; but a subtler loss arises (and I reflected often on this in Kerguelen) in any attempt to translate into English that wonderful, warm, inclusive, relaxed French word ‘génial’, when used of a social occasion.

I am making a list of missing English words. If you know of any, do drop me a line and I will add it. Top of that list, of course, is a word to describe a much-needed word which doesn’t exist.

Matthew Parris Is A Columnist On The Times.