There’s a bench outdoors my constructing in Bangkok, beneath a tree I couldn’t establish in case you paid me. Late afternoon, the solar comes by the leaves in transferring patches, and for ten minutes the pavement seems to be like one thing value badly photographing on a cellphone.
I sat on that bench for 2 years earlier than I discovered there was a phrase for it. Japanese has 木漏れ日, komorebi: daylight leaking by the gaps between leaves and branches. English wants a full sentence and a run-up.
Right here is the half that caught with me. I began noticing the sunshine extra typically as soon as I had the phrase for it.
A dictionary observed the identical factor
I’m not the primary to get caught on this. In its March 2025 replace, the Oxford English Dictionary added a batch of borrowed phrases and used komorebi as its instance of the hole it wished to fill. Wouldn’t it’s helpful, they requested, to have one phrase for dappled gentle by leaves? Or one for sitting outdoors having fun with a beer, which Norwegian manages in seven letters: utepils.
In addition they made some extent that will get misplaced within the listicles about stunning untranslatable phrases. Nothing is actually inconceivable to translate. A good translator can render komorebi in English all day. What makes these phrases attention-grabbing is that one language has bothered to compress the thought right into a single unit and one other has not.
That may be a smaller declare than the magical model. Additionally it is extra helpful, as a result of compression is one thing you possibly can copy.
Gigil bought in earlier than I did
In that very same replace, the OED added eleven phrases from the Philippines. One among them was gigil.
I grew up with gigil in Manila. It’s what you’re feeling taking a look at one thing unbearably cute, a fat-cheeked child or a small aggressive kitten, and it arrives as a bodily urge: clenched fingers, gritted tooth, the necessity to squeeze the factor. The OED dates its use in Philippine English to at the least 1990.
What I keep in mind is boarding college in Australia, aged 13, making an attempt to elucidate gigil to a room of youngsters who had by no means wanted the idea. I ended up miming it. They thought I used to be describing a cramp.
The sensation was an identical in each nations. Solely one in every of us may say it in two syllables.
Does having the phrase change what you see?
That is the place I’ve to watch out, as a result of the favored model of this concept is oversold.
The tidiest proof comes from blue. Russian has no single umbrella phrase for it. Lighter blues are goluboy, darker blues are siniy, and Russian audio system can not dodge the excellence the best way English audio system can.
A 2007 research in PNAS requested each teams to choose which of two blue squares matched a 3rd. Russian audio system had been faster when the squares fell both aspect of their language’s boundary. English audio system, given an identical squares, bought no such increase.
Better of all, the benefit vanished when contributors needed to silently rehearse an eight-digit quantity whereas they labored. Tie up the phrases and the impact goes with them, which suggests the language was doing dwell work somewhat than having rewired anybody’s eyes.
Then a 2020 re-run in Cognition repeated the duties and located the impact had actual limits. So the query continues to be dwell: language nudges consideration, but it surely doesn’t set up new {hardware}.
A nudge continues to be value having.
Naming a sense takes the sting off it
There’s a second strand of analysis right here, and this one I exploit.
A UCLA staff ran an fMRI research, printed in 2007, the place folks checked out offended and frightened faces. Once they merely seemed, the amygdala lit up. The amygdala is the little bit of the mind that handles risk, the smoke alarm. Once they picked a phrase for the emotion as an alternative, the alarm quieted down and a area behind the brow related to deliberate pondering turned extra energetic.
Researchers name this have an effect on labelling. In plain phrases, placing a sense into phrases appears to show the quantity down on it.
One imaging research is one imaging research, and small fMRI samples deserve warning. But it surely matches one thing I’ve discovered dependable. “I really feel terrible” sits in your chest all day. “I’m embarrassed about how I dealt with that cellphone name” is smaller, extra particular, and has an apparent subsequent transfer. Precision shrinks issues.
The best way to borrow effectively
The psychologist Tim Lomas has spent years amassing phrases like this. His 2016 paper catalogued 216 untranslatable phrases regarding wellbeing, sorted into emotions, relationships and character, and the record has since grown previous 600. It’s a good place to raid.
My rule for holding one is straightforward: it has to call a sense I have already got and wrestle to explain effectively. Thai has sabsung, the elevate you get from one thing that revives you. I exploit that one, as a result of I wanted it. I’ve quietly dropped a dozen prettier phrases that I used to be amassing somewhat than utilizing, which is a interest, not a apply.
Two issues make it stick. Say it out loud to somebody, which forces you to outline it and doubles as respectable dialog. And when no borrowed phrase matches, invent one. Households do that continually. Each household I’ve recognized has a personal time period for some particular home irritation, and people work in addition to those in Oxford.
Again to the bench. The tree continues to be unidentified and the sunshine nonetheless arrives round half 4. The distinction is that I lookup now.