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Sometimes we must turn to other languages to find le mot juste. Here are a whole bunch of foreign words with no direct English equivalent.

My faves:

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5. Backpfeifengesicht (German)
A face badly in need of a fist.

9. Mencolek (Indonesian)
You know that old trick where you tap someone lightly on the opposite shoulder from behind to fool them? The Indonesians have a word for it.

28. Boketto (Japanese)
It’s nice to know that the Japanese think enough of the act of gazing vacantly into the distance without thinking to give it a name.

https://getpocket.com/explore/...source=pocket-newtab

Astonished that the list doesn't include ...

schadenfreude.

It's mentioned in passing with one of the other German words, but I think they were going for foreign words/phrases that are perhaps less familiar to us.

Here's one that missing from Japanese: "fixer upper." There's no corresponding word that means "a house you buy that needs majors repairs before it can be lived in." There are words like renovate, repair, re-do etc. and there are ways to make a sentence that says "the house we bought will need significant repairs before we can move in" but there's no one-word way of saying "we bought a fixer upper" or "that house is a fixer upper."

It took me a really long time to convey this to Mr. SK. Then I said "so our new house is like two-steps above a fixer upper" at which he got rather irate and said "no it isn't!" Turns out the idea of being "two-steps above" translated to him as being "two steps worse than" rather than what I mean, "two-steps shy of" as in, slightly better than....

We confirmed that theses ideas don't convey well in Japanese when we had lunch with another Japanese friend and I asked her if she understood my describing (in Japanese) our new house as being "two steps above a house in need of significant repairs." She did not. And was like "OMG why would you buy a house like that."

This all has to do with attitudes toward real estate and how houses are bought and sold etc. in Japan. So it makes sense that there's no corresponding word for "fixer-upper" but it was funny the train wreck that "two-steps above" caused!

Also, for the record, our house is more like three or four steps above a fixer-upper.

Love them!

("Mental Floss" - orig. source, is an unfailing source of thought-provoking info and coolness.)

I know a native Czech speaker who moved to the US about 50 years ago. Upon learning English, he said he found English to be a much more expressive language than Czech. I think he meant more subtlety in word distinctions.