You see it quite often when someone will say ‘there’s a word for that…there’s no direct translation but it’s loosely like…’ then proceeds to give it a translation.
I saw one recently of kummerspeck, I think the commenter said it was ‘food you eat when you’re sad’ or ‘grief bacon’.
I would also like to preemptively apologise for my ignorance.
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You can’t have a word to describe every possible thing. Languages are just different sets of words made up by different sets of people to describe the world.
While making up that set of words, choices have to be made about which ones to keep and some just never came up.
Think of just words to describe colors, there an infinite number of them, you can’t name them all. If a group of people have given a specific color a specific name, and you’re not part of that group, it can be hard to describe by just using other words for colors.
If you for example don’t know the color ‘azure’. I might say it’s sort of blue, but not quite. Even if I had shown you the color, you might not even understand why I call it azure, since to you it just looks ‘blue’.
When you know a specific word that describes something specific, you tend to notice it a lot more, and develop a lot of nuance around it as you go though life noticing that description. If you live your life without such a word, it will often get lost in a sea of “things with no specific description”. That makes it even harder to convey a very specific word to someone who never even considered it as something ‘seperate’.
If you never knew of ‘azure’ it’s just some random shade of blue to you.
Another example that comes to mind is cars, especially if you’re not a car person. If someone you know is excited about their new car, and they tell you all about it, point out features and distinctions. You suddenly see this car everywhere, while before you saw it everywhere as well, you just didn’t notice it, because it didn’t have a word.
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