Forlesket is the Norwegian word for the euphoria felt while falling in love. In the Philipines, a gheegle is the unbearable urge to pinch the cheeks of something that is just beyond cute. A pochemuchka is a Russian who asks too many questions.
Which is not to say that English is hopeless and lacks imagination. It has its moments, but does it have words that are beyond the reach of other languages’ dictionaries?
A mark left behind on a glass table by a cold glass is a water spot to us but a cualacino to an Italian.
The itchiness of the upper lip just before taking the first sip from a glass of whiskey? That might be “addiction” for an English speaker but in Gaelic, it’s sgrioban.
Meraki is infusing what you are doing with soul or creativity or love. Very Greek.
Waldeinsamkeit is the feeling one experiences when he/she is alone in the German woods. Bavarian forest, perhaps? All Hansel, Gretel and Brothers’ Grimm or Julie Andrews’ hills are alive?
With my dyslexic inability to pronounce things, translations are the least of my worries, but I love the idea of large, or small, concepts rolled up into single words.
Jennier Petkov has the dubious honor of being the 85th most googled term this afternoon thanks to her stunningly self-absorbed Housewife of New Jersey via Michigan turn on a local news channel.
In case you’ve missed Jennifer, she’s the trending troll de jour due to her harpy-ish harassment of her neighbor’s dying grand-daughter, and her relentless campaign to mock the death of the little girl’s mother.
Mother and daughter carried the deadly Huntington’s gene. The mother passed away at 24 and the now seven-year old daughter is in the last stages of a disease that eats away brain tissue.
What would drive someone to mock and torment the terminally ill?
It’s the culmination of a two-year feud that began when Jennifer mistakenly believed that her neighbors had deliberately excluded her son from a birthday party. I believe there was a bouncy house involved. The Trojan War and WWI were bouncy house snubs, I believe.
Regardless, the battle was afoot and has trampled all over Jennifer’s neighborhood and with a little help front Photoshop, she took it to Facebook even.
Enter the press. And cue the clever pot-stirrer who uploaded this clip to YouTube:
My favorite part … aside from the head bobbing – their heads always bob – why? … is when the near speechless reporter asks Jennifer why she would do such a thing.
Her answer was basically because she could and it was fun.
“Take it or leave it,” she says as her final justification.
And that incredibly pouty, spoiled football player’s wife on The View is you.
The feeling that personal entitlement is all and that change, or meeting half way, is for the weak, those who aren’t strong enough (or too cognizant of the interconnectedness of humanity).
I wouldn’t defend Jennifer, but she is hardly an anomaly. The people bashing her today are Jennifer. Those who dedicated hate pages across the Social Mediascape to shame her and “give her a dose of her own medicine” are her too.
Jennifer’s mean girl ways are a timely find. Bullying is all over the news. Much hand-wringing and wondering why.
But there is nothing to wonder about. Bullying is part of who we are. It’s steeped in our culture of “take me or leave me”. The idea that we are free to impose, judge, forcibly coerce and bare our teeth like the Darwinian creatures we are is exactly what makes it possible for teens to mimic their same-sex fearing parents when they pick at their gay classmates until the whites of their bones show.
Sarah Palin‘s eye rolls. Rachel Maddow‘s contempt. Bill O’Reilly’s brow-beating. Jon Stewart‘s mockery. It’s Jennifer with a polish and book smarts, but it’s Jennifer no less. We are a nation of bullies. Our politics, our religions, our social fabric really is based on the idea that if the cause is perceived righteous – anything that has to be said or done to get the masses to line up and bleat is justified.
Just last evening, my oldest nephew pulled a “take it or leave it” on me. He’d spent the day before stirring the family crisis pot with teen angst and over-reaction that culminated in him “running away” for the night to make his point. When I talked with him the next day – after all the adults had made contact, assessed the actual facts and were on the same united page – he admitted that perhaps he’d gotten a bit overwrought,
“But it’s who I am,” he said, “and I can’t change it.”
I disagreed, and I still do. People are who they want to be. Their words and actions are who they are. Hurtfulness, manipulations that add up to bullying behavior aren’t justified by the ends no matter how heinous or righteous the cause. Jennifer was wrong, but the people who are harassing her right now are wrong too. They are bullies too.
Jennifer’s cause was the selfish preservation of face. She over-reacted two years ago but couldn’t admit it. She fell back on learned behavior that is not so different from what many people do on smaller scales in their places of work and within their families or social networks.
But any time words – or worse – are used to twist facts or to wound, it’s bullying. We Americans are mean girls at our core. Hypocrites. Just like Jennifer.
The Catholic grade school I attended did not have a wealthy parish on which to foist its expense tab. We had no gym and therefore no real P.E. class. While most of the other Catholic schools bused their junior high kids to the public schools for extras like Home Ec, Art, Industrial Tech and Music, we had skills units where we learned macrame or the fine art of tye-dye. We made a lot of friendship bracelets. It’s seriously a wonder I graduated from high school let alone university given the paltry education I received in junior high especially.*
So the fact that we actually had a computer in 1978 is beyond comprehension looking back. The parish priest was a penny-pinching curmudgeon who absolutely would have been okay with burqa’s. The man loathed females. I imagine when the computer arrived, it was only with the provision that girls be kept off of it as I can’t remember any of my friends or I ever getting to do much more than watch the boys play Oregon Trail.
It was an Apple II. To give you some perspective on technology in schools, when I was student teaching in 1986, the junior high I was at had a computer lab full of these same computers. The first middle school I was assigned to in 1988 was stocked with Apple IIe’s. Progress at the speed of walking.
The Oregon Trail was a way for our social studies teacher to lighten his load. As the computer was located in a small room off the main office, he would send us there in groups of 6. If that seems too big and a really stupid thing to do – it was. Six teenagers in a small, unsupervised room was a grave tactical error.** But with in excess of 30 students per class, I can’t fault the guy for his desperation though his method of divide and conquer did little more than irritate the school secretary.
Playing Oregon Trail was boring enough but as a group activity, it totally bit. I usually brought a novel along and read as the others tried to navigate an obstacle course of dysentery, venomous snakes and unfordable rivers.
Bullets were key. Caulk was crucial. And tombstones abounded.
Apparently one can still purchase this game on Amazon … for six dollars. Sounds about right.
*I did nothing for two years. The school was a zone. Why none of our teachers just cracked and showed up with a shotgun one day, I don’t know. We often thought the Social Studies teacher was capable of a break with reality as he was often reminding us of his tour in ‘Nam. If it weren’t for the fact that I wrote or read near constantly to keep boredom at bay, I’d be a shift supervisor at a fast food joint today.
**I was often guided in my own teaching career by memories of the idiotic things my junior high teachers did.
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