Product Description

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? Or that the Albanians have twenty-seven words for moustache? Or that the Dutch word for skimming stones is plimpplamppletteren? Drawing on the collective wisdom of over 280 languages, this intriguing book is arranged by theme so that you can compare attitudes all over the world to such subjects as food, the human body and the battle of the sexes. Here, you can find not only those words for which there is no direct counterpart in English (such as pana po'o in Hawaiian - to scratch your head in order to remember something important), but also those that sound confusingly the same (gin in Turkish means to dry out). Oh, and tingo is a Pascuense word from the Easter Islands meaning to borrow things from a friend's house one by one until there's nothing left .

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #79121 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Unknown Binding
• 224 pages

Stephen Fry
A book no well-stocked bookshelf, cistern-top or handbag should be without.

The Economist, 24 September 2005
'The Meaning of Tingo' may well prove to be the must-have British stocking-filler for 2005

The Times, 22 September 2005
...compulsively perusable