The remarkable capacity of the English language to borrow and absorb, in regular usage, words from other languages – with words that originated in French and German before coming into common use in English – is rather widely known. But an even more unlikely contender for loaning words to the English is Japanese.
A word many book lovers have learned is tsundoku, which refers to the growing pile of unread books one acquires or buys, without finding the time to read them. Most people know tycoon, to refer to an opulently wealthy business magnate, and honcho, for chief, are derived from Japanese, as (of course) is karaoke. Kids will tell you about the Japanese terms manga (comic books and graphic novels) and anime (a reverse usage from the English “animation”); elegant homemakers will know bonsai, ikebana, and origami from their décor. Even more people speak of ramen noodles and sleep on a futon without realising these words came from Japanese too. But there are several other Japanese words which – though not as widely understood as “rendezvous” (from French) or zeitgeist (from German) – are nonetheless finding increasing acceptance in English, as words that describe something better than any existing words in our dictionaries.
My favourite Japanese loanword is probably wabi-sabi, a marvellous term that means accepting imperfection as a natural part of life. The Japanese are actually perfectionists – spotlessly clean, neat, and well-organised – so it may surprise you that they have developed a philosophical acceptance of the idea that not everything is perfect, permanent, or immutable; things and people eventually decay and die. An attitude of wabi-sabi also extends to aesthetics, like admiring an object because of a natural flaw in it rather than demanding that it be blemish-free.
Better known is perhaps ikigai, a term that summarises your sense of purpose in life. More and more I find New Age friends referring to some source of motivation as ikigai – the sense of purpose that drives them on to taking on demanding new challenges. Someone whose ikigai hasn’t yet been ignited might be boketto, unfocused and daydreaming, staring vacantly into space, aimless and unpurposeful.
Japanese culture not only gives us such words as geisha, haiku, kimono, wasabi, and zen, as well as several terms from Japanese martial arts, such as judo, ju-jitsu, karate, and ninja, but also dojo (a room or padded mat for judo). Japanese also has some lovely terms for people and relationships that English culture did not generate. A friend you can always rely upon in times of need, someone who will always be there for you, is majime, a word which encapsulates a number of qualities – reliability, sincerity, willingness to put in the hard yards. It’s unlikely that a majime can be an ozappa, a person who is totally relaxed, unfazed by adversity and, by and large, couldn’t care less about anything at all. A very different kind of relationship is conjured up by Koi No Yokan, the feeling you get when you meet a stranger and are so taken by her or him that you are sure you will fall in love with them – even if you have just met them.
Just as the Eskimo language is said to have 17 different words for different types of snow and ice to distinguish them (whereas Hindi, for instance, just has “baraf” to cover both snow and ice, since Hindi speakers see so little of either), so also Japanese has very precise words for weather. The word kogarashi, literally “leaf wilting wind”, has made its way into English usage to refer to the first cold winds of the late autumn season that alert you that winter is around the corner.
American English has become fond of the word skosh, a synonym of “tad” or “smidgen” – such as in “could you turn the air-conditioning up a skosh”? It comes from the Japanese word sukoshu which means the same thing – a spot, a dash. (You could ask an Indian waiter for a skosh of milk in your tea, but I wouldn’t be optimistic about the results.) Indians assume that the English word rickshaw, pronounced raksha in Hindi, originated in the subcontinent, but in fact, it comes from the Japanese jinrikisha – jin means “man”, riki means “strength” or “power,” and sha means “carriage”.
But why worry about words at all, you might well ask, when the Japanese have given us emojis, those clever little pictures that serve increasingly as a substitute for text? Perhaps we should just say sayonara to the whole subject?
In a tweet critising the media attacks on actor Shah Rukh Khan’s 23-year-old son, I decried the “ghoulish epicaricacy” that animated this all-out assault on the young man. My use of the word epicaricacy, meaning deriving pleasure from the misfortunes of others, sent many scurrying to the dictionary. Amusingly enough several objected that I need not have employed such an obscure English word when there was a perfectly adequate substitute available from German – schadenfreude, a word far more commonly used in English to describe the malicious satisfaction that some people gain from seeing others suffer!
This is true – schadenfreude is more often used than epicaricacy – and it points to the remarkable capacity of the English language to absorb infusions from elsewhere. Where a foreign language has a word that precisely connotes something, English is happy to embrace it. And a surprising number of these borrowed words come from German, a language more commonly associated with long, polysyllabic formulations that are usually considered hard to pronounce and harder to spell!
More commonly used and therefore familiar to readers of English-language newspapers would be words like angst, ersatz, kitsch, hinterland, leitmotiv, realpolitik, and wanderlust – words that are so common they are not even italicized in English and many don’t even realize they were borrowed from German. Kitsch describes cheap, often gaudy art or tourist trinkets, and is used with a sneer to refer to items purchased by people with poor taste. Some of those items might be ersatz, a German word meaning “replacement” that’s used in English to refer to a cheap, inferior substitute for something. (“That ersatz plastic statuette was such a piece of kitsch! why did she buy it?”) Hinterland is the inland trade region or district behind a port and served by it, often bordering a coast or river and claimed by the state that owns the coast. Realpolitik, which may gradually be falling into disuse in English, refers to the practice of hard-nosed power politics to pursue a country’s national interests without heed to moral or ethical considerations. (It was first devised in German to describe the policies of the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the term stuck.) Realpolitik was the leitmotiv of his foreign policy (leitmotiv being another German term, this time used in music, for a dominant and recurring theme).
Excerpted with permission from A Wonderland of Words: Around the Word in 101 Essays, Shashi Tharoor, Aleph Book Company.
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