In The Meaning of Tingo
, author Adam Jacot de Boinod admits that — in researching his book — he found many unusual foreign words that he could not, in the end, verify.
Two of my favorite of these unverified words were attributed to Japanese:
, which means ‘to look worse after a haircut’
Ariga-meiwaku, which is ‘an act someone does for you that you didn’t want to have them do and tried to avoid having them do, but they went ahead anyway, determined to do you a favor, and then things went wrong and caused you a lot of trouble, yet in the end social conventions required you to express gratitude’.
October 27th, 2006 at 5:18 pm
Might I suggest some Russian?
1) everybody talks about schaudenfreude as if only the Germans could think of such a diabolical word. The Russians have “zloradost” – which means, roughly “taking joy in evil/the misfortune of others”. Pretty much the same thing.
The Russian word for midget is “Liliput”
To play someone for a fool is “veshat lapsha na ushi” – hang noodles from their ears.
and the word for ladybug is “bozhya korovka” or “God’s little cow”
And the hard disk on your computer is called a “Winchester” (ok “Vinchester”) because they were originally created using vacuum tubes that had the approximate gauge of rifles.
June 11th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
A Russian equivalent (except without the gratitude part) to Ariga-meiwaku is: “Medvezhiya usluga,” which literally means: “a bear’s help.”
December 18th, 2007 at 5:50 pm
I believe the word is arigata meiwaku, not ariga meiwaku.
I’m not sure about age otori, though.
March 7th, 2009 at 8:51 am
Yes, I think To is correct. It should be arigata-meiwaku.