My research has shown that some of the words in Tingo aren’t even known to most native speakers. This may sound odd, until you think of all the unusual English words that are not known by most people. Then there are words which belong, more or less, to dialects, like the Scottish weather words I found, most of them, unsurprisingly, to do with rain. Dreich, ‘a miserably wet day’; plowtery, meaning ‘showery’; and drookit, ‘soaked to the skin’. Most people south of the Watford Gap wouldn’t have heard of these words, so I shouldn’t be surprised that nakhur, a Persian word meaning ‘a camel that won’t give milk until her nostrils are tickled’ isn’t widely known in Iran.
There are other words in Tingo that I’ve managed to verify, but am still curious to know more about. The Inuit word areodjarekput, for example, meaning, ‘to exchange wives for a few days only’. How exactly does this work? What happens if one party wants to keep the new arrangement as it is? The chances are, surely, that the excitement of the new will mean that quite often the end of the exchange could be tricky, to put it mildly.
One of the frustrations of putting together this book has been finding wonderful words that I’ve been unable to verify, and so had to leave out. Age-otori for example, a Japanese word which supposedly means ‘to look worse after a haircut’. What a great concept. I’ve been there myself. Even though Ifound it on a website, the Japanese speakers I consulted didn’t think it existed, and I couldn’t track it down in any dictionaries, so out it went. Another favourite met the same fate: the Spanish aranjear, ‘to kill a cockerel by throwing oranges at it’.Does anybody out there have more on these words?
