language – everydaysparks

On Saturday, I was reading an article in the Good Weekend magazine on Eddie Jones, the former Wallabies coach who has gone to the dark side and is now coaching England (see you and your team of losers on the 18th in Melbourne, Eddie). Anyway, the author of the article, Peter Wilson, included an interesting fact that I wanted to share with you here. Just in case any of you are geeks like me, and find this sort of stuff kinda cool…

So, now you know. (Apologies if you already did, and I am the only person alive who had no clue. Awks.) Thanks to Fairfax for still printing newspapers and for still employing journalists (not enough, but that’s another story for another day) to help us learn new stuff.

I always love to hear new words or expressions and, although I don’t catch on too quickly to the YOLO, OMG, ROFLMAO kinda acronyms used by the kids of today, it’s interesting to hear another language and try to appreciate what it all means. Even more so when it is actually a real language, with culture and history attached. And although the English language seems to have quite a lot of words to choose from, sometimes you’ll hear a word or expression from another land and think: bingo! That really captures it perfectly – I wish we had a word like that.

In honour of some of those types of words, artist Fuchsia Macaree put together an alphabet of expressive words that are missing from the English language. Here are some examples…

You can check out the rest of this clever collection at the Fast Company magazine Co. Create site here. While you’re enhancing your vocabulary, just remember that you can’t use these words in Scrabble, no matter how tempted you may be…