Product Description

A garden of delights for the word obsessed: a funny, amazing, and even profound world tour of the best of all those strange words that don't have a precise English equivalent, the ones that tell us so much about other cultures' priorities and preoccupations and expand our minds.

Did you know that people in Bolivia have a word that means "I was rather too drunk last night and it's all their fault"? That there's no Italian equivalent for the word "blue"? That the Dutch word for skimming stones is "plimpplamppletteren"? This delightful book, which draws on the collective wisdom of more than 254 languages, includes not only those words for which there is no direct counterpart in English ("pana po'o" in Hawaiian means to scratch your head in order to remember something important), but also a frank discussion of exactly how many Eskimo words there are for snow and the longest known palindrome in any language ("saippuakivikauppias"--Finland).

And all right, what in fact is "tingo"? In the Pascuense language of Easter Island, it's to take all the objects one desires from the house of a friend, one at a time, by asking to borrow them. Well, of course it is. Enhanced by its ingenious and irresistible little Schott's Miscellany/Eats Shoots and Leaves package and piquant black-and-white illustrations throughout, The Meaning of Tingo is a heady feast for word lovers of all persuasions. Viva Tingo!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #387370 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Amazon.com Review
What began as a fortuitous discovery, when BBC researcher Adam Jacot de Boinod noticed that an Albanian dictionary contained 27 different words each for eyebrows and mustache, has become, after his obsessive 18-month journey through hundreds of foreign dictionaries, a very funny and genuinely informative guide to the world's strangest--and most useful--words. There are many books out there that invent, Sniglets-style, the words that the English language doesn't have but needs. What The Meaning of Tingo shows is that, like natural cures waiting to be found in the plants of the rainforest, many of the words already exist, in the languages of the world's other cultures. Who couldn't find a use for "neko-neko," an Indonesian word for "one who has a creative idea which only makes things worse," or "skeinkjari," a term from the Faroe Islands for "the man who goes among wedding guests offering them alcohol"? Some words that Jacot de Boinod has found are bizarre--"koro," the "hysterical belief that one's penis is shrinking into one's body" in Japanese--while others are surprisingly affecting, like the Inuit word "iktsuarpok," which means "to go outside often to see if someone is coming." And then there's "tingo" itself, from the Pascuense language of Easter Island: "to take all the objects one desires from the house of a friend, one at a time, by borrowing them."

Nearly any page you open to in The Meaning of Tingo pays hilarious tribute to the inventive genius of the world's peoples. Like Eat, Shoots & Leaves and Schott's Miscellany, with which it shares a quirky British charm and a gift-friendly look and size, The Meaning of Tingo is a UK bestseller that by all rights should become equally popular in the States. --Tom Nissley

The Man Who Swallowed 200 Dictionaries

There is no word (that we know of) to describe someone who spends a year and half of their life poring through a library's worth of dictionaries in hundreds of languages, but that's exactly what Adam Jacot de Boinod did after a chance encounter with a heavy Albanian dictionary. Listen to our interview with the author to hear just how he got started on this strange but fruitful journey, and what he hopes might be the usefulness of his light-hearted book in making us aware of the cultural riches in danger of being lost as the world's living languages become extinct nearly as quickly as its species.

The Meaning of Tingo Language Learning Lab

Adam Jacot de Boinod has chosen a handful of his own favorite words from The Meaning of Tingo Click here to hear him pronounce and define the words, and start slipping them into conversation today!

	nakhur, Persian	a camel that won't give milk until her nostrils are tickled
	areodjarekput, Inuit	to exchange wives for a few days only
	marilopotes, ancient Greek	a gulper of coaldust
	ilunga, Tshiluba, Congo	someone who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time
	cigerci, Turkish	a seller of liver and lungs
	seigneur-terrasse, French	a person who spends much time but little money in a cafe (literally: a terrace lord)
	Torschlusspanik, German	the fear of diminishing opportunities as one gets older (literally: gate-closing panic; often applied to women worried about being too old to have children.)
	pana po'o, Hawaiian	to scratch your head in order to remember something
	waterponie, Afrikaans	jet ski

Review
...a luscious list of linguistic one-liners. -- Daily Express

...a pleasure to dip in to. -- Sunday Telegraph

...compulsively perusable. -- The Times

...destined to be the Eats, Shoots and Leaves of the autumn. -- The Independent

The Meaning of Tingo may well prove to be the must-have stocking-filler for 2005. -- The Economist

A book no well-stocked bookshelf, cistern-top or handbag should be without. -- Stephen Fry

I liked the inventiveness of the Spanish curse "may all your turkey's feathers turn into razor blades. -- Steven Poole, The Guardian

Review
At last we know those Eskimo words for snow and how the Dutch render the sound of Rice Krispies. Adam Jacot de Boinod has produced an absolutely delicious little book. (Stephen Fry, author of Ode Less Traveled)

Customer Reviews

Overrated
As a native speaker of one of the less familiar languages mentioned in the book, I found the glosses to be oversimpilified at best and completely wrong at worst. It seems the author wanted to make a point and to do so, resorted to making the facts fit the explanation. Since the facts of one language have been distorted in this fashion, how is one to know that the facts of languages one has no knowledge of have been similarly distorted?
Reading about languages and their peculiarities is fun, but if the facts are not accurate, then the whole book is quite suspect. I do not recommend the book, unless you want to see how your language has been distorted.

Entertaining, but unreliable.
If rated on sheer entertainment value, this book would earn 4.5 stars. Unfortunately, as has been documented in several internet fora, the author's credulity far outweighs his scholarship. Quite simply, an unhealthy percentage (at my estimate 20-30%) of the 'words' quoted in this book simply do not exist*. Thus, on scholarship, the book earns only 1.5 stars.

My 3-star overall rating represents an average of the 4.5 for entertainment value and 1.5 for scholarship.

* Two of the more egregious examples are the infamous 'razbliuto', alleged to be a Russian word meaning 'the sentimental feeling you have about someone you once loved but no longer do', but whose existence is denied by any native Russian-speaker, and 'Scheissenbedauern', an alleged German word for `the disappointment one feels when something turns out not nearly as badly as one had expected'. There is no such word as 'Scheissenbedauern' in German - nor could there be, as it doesn't even obey the standard rules of German for forming portmanteau words (it would have to be 'Scheissbedauern'). Even minimal checking on the author's part would have alerted him to the bogus nature of this entry. Unfortunately, it becomes clear that, time after time, the author failed to carry out even the most basic fact-checking for this book.

Double Dutch?
In other reviews of this book it's already mentioned that, amongst others, the Chinese, Russian and German examples in this book are for a large part dodgy or just plainly wrong. This is also the case for the examples from the Dutch language the author cites from. The blurb states that he read '140 websites' in order to compile this book, as well as some '280 dictionaries'. (Does Mr Jacot de Boinod know how many languages there are in the world?) He should have spoken to some international linguists, and have somebody else get the notes down instead. On the jacket of the book, this example is highlighted: 'The Dutch word for skimming stones is plimplampetteren.' No, it isn't - there is no such word in the Dutch dictionary. Or on the web, for that matter. There is however, a word called pimpampetten, which is a card game for children based on trivia. (examples can be seen at www.anderspel.nl/pimpampet.html).

On the back cover, Stephen Fry is raving about how delighted he is now that he knows how the Dutch render the word of Rice Krispies - according to the book, this should be: 'Knisper! Knasper! Knusper!'. I don't know which language the author got this from in order to give false information to Stephen Fry or any other member of his reading audience. I would estimate that about 70-80% of the examples from the Dutch language are mistaken. It's like Python's old Hungarian Prasebook, but much less funny. All in all, it's quite a disaster and I am somewhat concerned that a prestigious house like Penguin has published this with no further editing or checking done.