I wish there were a clear and concise word in English for the Japanese 貧乏揺すり binbōyusuri: unconscious tapping or shaking, especially with your foot (and especially while sitting). We all know this and almost all of us do it, but there's no simple term for it.
I would call that fidgeting, from being uncomfortable or restless. As a phenomenon, I've heard it called a "nervous or unconscious tic". It might also be called a "stim".
clawgrip wrote:I wish there were a clear and concise word in English for the Japanese 貧乏揺すり binbōyusuri: unconscious tapping or shaking, especially with your foot (and especially while sitting). We all know this and almost all of us do it, but there's no simple term for it.
I've heard it referred to as "wobbling your foot". You could try nominalizing it to "foot wobbling", though that's not a term people use at all. I can't even find examples of it using Google! (Instances of "foot wobbling" use "wobbling" as a present participle, or have punctuation in the middle.)
Serafín wrote:I've heard it referred to as "wobbling your foot".
Ironically, that's what I was doing as I read this.
Since you mentioned it in another thread: vergüenza ajena. There's an equivalent in German (Fremdscham), but I don't know of one in English. ("Spanish shame" is completely foreign to me.)
treegod wrote:I've thought, I like the Spanish word ajeno, and I think there should be an equivalent word in English (examples I see I can only translate into clunky phrase: someone else's/of someone else).
I've just found out about the Latin word sopio: a caricature of a man with a large penis, like in graffiti. It's something we see in everyday life but have no name for!
Perhaps this is in the wrong thread, but flipping through a Tangut dictionary, I found that it has a single word for "excrement of insects".
I did have a bizarrely similar (to the original poster's) accident about four years ago, in which I slipped over a cookie and somehow twisted my ankle so far that it broke
What kind of cookie?
Aeetlrcreejl > Kicgan Vekei > me /ne.ses.tso.sats/
Aeetlrcreejl wrote:Perhaps this is in the wrong thread, but flipping through a Tangut dictionary, I found that it has a single word for "excrement of insects".
The Tohono O'odham have such a single word as well.
I know this because they, in a moment of poetic semantic drift, applied it to punctuation. Commas, quote marks, periods, and so forth are, collectively, "fly shit". This is in the O'odham dictionary, at any rate.
Tonkawa has a word for "to kill someone by an ejection of fetid fluid".
I did have a bizarrely similar (to the original poster's) accident about four years ago, in which I slipped over a cookie and somehow twisted my ankle so far that it broke
What kind of cookie?
Aeetlrcreejl > Kicgan Vekei > me /ne.ses.tso.sats/
Talāṃ leya kalakena rāmah, saktalām peha leya bhūmena ca. See a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower. Omkāṃs tava sutvantayam pharo, 'naiṃ le' jeś ca. Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.
linguoboy wrote:Just yesterday, I found another great German word to add to my collection of amusing "untranslatables": Morgenmuffel "person who is grumpy in the mornings". (Best translation IMD would probably be "not a morning person".) It turns out that -muffel is semiproductive for "person who is grumpy at the prospect of something", e.g. Krawattenmuffel "person who doesn't like to wear neckties", Partymuffel "party pooper".
How often do people use that word?, because it's fucking awesome. Seriously, can we make that an English word? It's so fun so say (at least the Englishicized version i'm saying in my head is) and it has a useful meaning.