Just a quick note to let everyone know that I’ve been posting reports from my book tour events through a Gadling special feature entitled Rolf Potts: The Marco Polo Book Tour Diary.

This book tour diary, which also contains all manner of tangential material (in a post last week I interviewed myself, Blender-style, about the prospect of trashing hotel rooms and dealing with groupies) will run about 2-4 times a week through the end of November. Updated entries online here.

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:

• Age-otori, 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’.

It’s been awhile since I’ve shared any of the weird words from Adam Jacot de Boinod’s The Meaning of Tingo, so — for travelers looking to wow (or just confuse) their international hosts — here are a few choice global vocabularly nuggets:

• The Dutch word for skimming stones is plimpplamppletteren.
• Nakhur is Persian for a camel that won’t give milk until her nostrils are tickled.
• Cigerci is Turkish for a seller of liver and lungs.
• Madogiwazoku is Japanese for “window gazers” (i.e., office workers who sit at desks with little to do).
• Seigneur-terrasse is French for a person who spends much time but little money in a café.
• Tsuji-giri is Japanese for trying out a new sword on a passer-by (an example of the lack of respect for peasants by the Samurai).
• Torschlusspanik is German the fear of diminishing opportunities as one gets older.

In the United States and England, the four suits in playing cards are ‘diamonds’, ‘hearts’, ‘clubs’ and ’spades’. According to an entry on Adam Jacot de Boinod’s blog, however, other languages interpret these symbols differently.

The French for clubs, for example, is “trèfles”, meaning ‘clover’ (which makes more sense to me than ‘clubs’). In Italian, spades are known as “picche”, or pikes. In Malay, clubs are given the name “kelawar”, which means (of all things) ‘cave bat’.

A reader adds the following Cantonese equivalents, which I found interesting:

• Hearts: hong sum (紅心 or red heart)
• Diamonds: gaai dzuen (階磚 or paving tiles)
• Clubs: mooi fa (梅花 or plum blossoms)
• Spades: kwai sin (葵扇 or a palm leaf fan)

This week’s weird word from The Meaning of Tingo is areodjarekput, which is an Inuit word that means “to exchange wives for a few days only”.

Naturally, as author Adam Jacot de Boinod points out at his blog, this word raises the question: How exactly does this arrangement work? And at what point does areodjarekput cease to be areodjarekput and begin to be longer-term endeavor, which would require a new word?

I suppose one would have to travel north and ask some Inuit folks to find out…

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Not long ago, I commented on an intriguing new book by Adam Jacot de Boinod, entitled The Meaning of Tingo: And Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World. Since that time, I’ve been in touch with Jacot de Boinod, and he’s agreed to share words from his book as a little weekly feature here at Vagablogging.net.

“Many English speakers admit to being lazy both at home and when traveling in their reliance on English as the preeminent international language,” he told me. “I feel that in this multicultural age we should embrace the joy, glory and wonder of foreign words and expressions. I want, at a time, when languages are becoming extinct at the rate of one a fortnight (just like the reduction of animal species and flora and fauna) to encourage their survival and chance to flourish.”

Jacot de Boinod’s interest in foreign languages was first piqued when doing research for British television, and eventually developed into a full-blown obsession. While compiling this book, he read approximately 220 dictionaries, 150 websites and numerous other books on language. In The Meaning of Tingo, he draws on the collective wisdom of more than 254 languages, and 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).

Given the title of the book, it’s only logical that this week’s weird word is tingo, which, in the Pascuense language of Easter Island, means “to take all the objects one desires from the house of a friend, one at a time, by asking to borrow them.” (Anyone who is doubtful of this Pacific Islander practice should read The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost.)

More weird words to come in future weeks. In the meantime, language enthusiasts should check out Jacot de Boinod’s website here.