The Meaning of Tingo: And Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World
by Adam Jacot de Boinod
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Book Summary Information
Author: Adam Jacot de BoinodEdition: Hardcover
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2006-03-16
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: Amazon Remainders Account
Book Reviews of The Meaning of Tingo: And Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World
Book Review: Entertaining, but unreliable.
Summary: 3 Stars
If rated on sheer entertainment value, this book would earn 4.5 stars. Unfortunately, as has been documented in several internet fora, the author's credulity far outweighs his scholarship. Quite simply, an unhealthy percentage (at my estimate 20-30%) of the 'words' quoted in this book simply do not exist*. Thus, on scholarship, the book earns only 1.5 stars.
My 3-star overall rating represents an average of the 4.5 for entertainment value and 1.5 for scholarship.
* Two of the more egregious examples are the infamous 'razbliuto', alleged to be a Russian word meaning 'the sentimental feeling you have about someone you once loved but no longer do', but whose existence is denied by any native Russian-speaker, and 'Scheissenbedauern', an alleged German word for `the disappointment one feels when something turns out not nearly as badly as one had expected'. There is no such word as 'Scheissenbedauern' in German - nor could there be, as it doesn't even obey the standard rules of German for forming portmanteau words (it would have to be 'Scheissbedauern'). Even minimal checking on the author's part would have alerted him to the bogus nature of this entry. Unfortunately, it becomes clear that, time after time, the author failed to carry out even the most basic fact-checking for this book.
Summary of The Meaning of Tingo: And Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World
A garden of delights for the word obsessed: a funny, amazing, and even profound world tour of the best of all those strange words that don't have a precise English equivalent, the ones that tell us so much about other cultures' priorities and preoccupations and expand our minds.Did you know that people in Bolivia have a word that means "I was rather too drunk last night and it's all their fault"? That there's no Italian equivalent for the word "blue"? That the Dutch word for skimming stones is "plimpplamppletteren"? This delightful book, which draws on the collective wisdom of more than 254 languages, includes not only those words for which there is no direct counterpart in English ("pana po'o" in Hawaiian means to scratch your head in order to remember something important), but also a frank discussion of exactly how many Eskimo words there are for snow and the longest known palindrome in any language ("saippuakivikauppias"--Finland).
And all right, what in fact is "tingo"? In the Pascuense language of Easter Island, it's to take all the objects one desires from the house of a friend, one at a time, by asking to borrow them. Well, of course it is. Enhanced by its ingenious and irresistible little Schott's Miscellany/Eats Shoots and Leaves package and piquant black-and-white illustrations throughout, The Meaning of Tingo is a heady feast for word lovers of all persuasions. Viva Tingo!
What began as a fortuitous discovery, when BBC researcher Adam Jacot de Boinod noticed that an Albanian dictionary contained 27 different words each for eyebrows and mustache, has become, after his obsessive 18-month journey through hundreds of foreign dictionaries, a very funny and genuinely informative guide to the world's strangest--and most useful--words. There are many books out there that invent, Sniglets-style, the words that the English language doesn't have but needs. What The Meaning of Tingo shows is that, like natural cures waiting to be found in the plants of the rainforest, many of the words already exist, in the languages of the world's other cultures. Who couldn't find a use for "neko-neko," an Indonesian word for "one who has a creative idea which only makes things worse," or "skeinkjari," a term from the Faroe Islands for "the man who goes among wedding guests offering them alcohol"? Some words that Jacot de Boinod has found are bizarre--"koro," the "hysterical belief that one's penis is shrinking into one's body" in Japanese--while others are surprisingly affecting, like the Inuit word "iktsuarpok," which means "to go outside often to see if someone is coming." And then there's "tingo" itself, from the Pascuense language of Easter Island: "to take all the objects one desires from the house of a friend, one at a time, by borrowing them."
Nearly any page you open to in The Meaning of Tingo pays hilarious tribute to the inventive genius of the world's peoples. Like Eat, Shoots & Leaves and Schott's Miscellany, with which it shares a quirky British charm and a gift-friendly look and size, The Meaning of Tingo is a UK bestseller that by all rights should become equally popular in the States. --Tom Nissley
The Man Who Swallowed 200 Dictionaries
There is no word (that we know of) to describe someone who spends a year and half of their life poring through a library's worth of dictionaries in hundreds of languages, but that's exactly what Adam Jacot de Boinod did after a chance encounter with a heavy Albanian dictionary. Listen to our interview with the author to hear just how he got started on this strange but fruitful journey, and what he hopes might be the usefulness of his light-hearted book in making us aware of the cultural riches in danger of being lost as the world's living languages become extinct nearly as quickly as its species.
The Meaning of Tingo Language Learning Lab
Adam Jacot de Boinod has chosen a handful of his own favorite words from The Meaning of Tingo Click here to hear him pronounce and define the words, and start slipping them into conversation today!
| nakhur, Persian | a camel that won't give milk until her nostrils are tickled | ||
| areodjarekput, Inuit | to exchange wives for a few days only | ||
| marilopotes, ancient Greek | a gulper of coaldust | ||
| ilunga, Tshiluba, Congo | someone who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time | ||
| cigerci, Turkish | a seller of liver and lungs | ||
| seigneur-terrasse, French | a person who spends much time but little money in a cafe (literally: a terrace lord) | ||
| Torschlusspanik, German | the fear of diminishing opportunities as one gets older (literally: gate-closing panic; often applied to women worried about being too old to have children.) | ||
| pana po'o, Hawaiian | to scratch your head in order to remember something | ||
| waterponie, Afrikaans | jet ski |
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