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Thursday, May 30, 2013

Fun With Foreign Words

Back in March I shared a link to a list of English words that are no longer used but should be. The other day I stumbled upon this list of foreign words that we could use in English at Mental Floss.

The list does not include my personal favorite foreign word that has no English equivalent, Schadenfreude, but that's okay because Schadenfreude is used an awful lot in English (particularly in the corners of the Internet that I tend to frequent).

I'm disappointed that the list didn't include pronunciation; some of the words are in languages I've never heard of and there's no way I could pronounce them. I recognized one of the words, Koi No Yokan, because it's the name of the Deftones record that came out last year, but I didn't know how to pronounce it in November and I still don't. (On the plus side, I now know what it means.)

I appreciated that the list included Schlemiel and Schlimazel; I've known those words my whole life thanks to Laverne & Shirley, but I never had any idea what they meant.

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