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: #248768 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

Customer Reviews

All made up?
I bought this book as a present and only had a short look. The first German word I came across was "fisselig". Being a native German speaker I am not aware of its existence. I am not aware of a word in German that means "flustered to the point of incompetence" either. Should the expressions be known only in small areas of a country so that the "average" native does not know them I think it should be stated. Also, some of the other expressions are very outdated and unlikely to be familiar to many native German speakers.
I agree that books about language can be very entertaining and we Germans do have words the rest of the world doesn´t seem to have ("Schadenfreude" being an excellent example). However, I wonder about the existence and the definitions of the non German words in the book.

Tedious Tingo
I'd read about this book in some of the press and was looking forward to getting it - what a disappointment. Sure there are some amusing words, but the vast majority you could not care less what they meant. After the first few pages it just starts to resemble a directory - and we all know how boring they are. Enough invention and amusement to carry a few pages but not a whole book in my view- but I guess its Christmas and that's when a lot of these tedious supposedly funny list books appear.

Poorly researched, inaccurate
This book is a nice idea, but sadly resorts to stereotypes and relies on very worrying research. I came across a number of nonexistent words in the langauges that I speak....who knows how many more there are. It seems like the author did a lot of google searches and put them together in a book. A shame.