From The Writers' Almanac for Monday, January 27 (shout out to Laurie McKnight for sharing)
It was on this day in 1754 that the word "serendipity" was first coined. It's defined by Merriam-Webster as "the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for." It was recently listed by a U.K. translation company as one of the English language's 10 most difficult words to translate. Other words to make their list include plenipotentiary, gobbledegook, poppycock, whimsy, spam, and kitsch.Given that these are so hard to translate, I thought I’d offer up some (very silly) examples. Here goes, with all due apologies to Merriam, Webster, et al.:
1. Serendipity. A very cool coincidence. An event whose happening is somewhere between fate and chance. Something that happens to you that’s good and always happens when you’re looking the other way, like when mothers tell their daughters that they’ll find the man of their dreams when they stop looking for him. Every romantic movie features the element of serendipity: the pair meets (or meets again) in the strangest of ways, totally unexpected (to them). Sleepless in Seattle doesn’t count because they were looking for each other. The number one rule of serendipity is that you can’t look for it. My nomination for most serendipitous movie of all time: Forrest Gump.
2. Plenipotentiary. I can pronounce it (I think), and know it has something to do with governing, but without resort to the web, have nothing much to say. I googled the word, learned (or relearned) that it means one invested with full power – one who can come to the negotiating table with the power to speak on behalf of the principal. It took two pages to even find a reference to actual usage and wouldn’t you know – it’s from the United Nations, whose ITU (International Telecommunication Union) has a Plenipotentiary every so often. Presumably this is a meeting of representatives who have the authority to make decisions on their nations’ collective behalf. Of course, I’m only guessing, never having been. The next one, should you wish to join in, will be in 2014 in Busan, South Korea’s second largest city.
3. Gobbledegook (which I always thought was spelled gobblygook - shows how much I know). A hodge-podge. A mish-mash. Now you see the problem of trying to define something hard to define: all its synonyms are equally obscure.
4. Poppycock. A nice way of saying ‘bull shit’. Synonyms: nonsense; not true; wrong; insupportable; bull shit.
5. Whimsy. Silliness that’s sort of romantic or cute. A teenage girl who dresses like she’s 4 is whimsical. A 60-year-old woman who does is creepy. One is cute; the other is wrong. The cute one is an example of whimsy.
6. Spam. I’m guessing this refers not to the internet phenomena of being hit with a snow-ball of an e-mail or other mass event, but rather to the meat-like product of same name. No wonder it cannot be explained – who would do that to meat? So to my friends around the world, the best I can explain spam is this: take every part of a land animal you find most disgusting, throw them together, grind them into mush, squeeze it all together in a small container until it forms a solid and call it ‘spam’. We don’t understand it either. And I have yet to meet anyone who admits to eating it, although I have heard rumors of fried Spam and it does continue to appear on grocery shelves, so unless those cans on the shelf are post-WWII relics, some of you are lying to me.
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