Personal descriptions

My dear avanzado students. If my memory serves me correctly, we started the course by practicing our ability to describe people (I’m a people person, he’s a good laugh, I keep myself to myself, etc.). Remember?

Recently I have asked you to discuss whether opposites attract (as the cliché goes) or not. We have also talked about personal relationships (longterm commitments, summer flings, lifelong partners, etc.). In all these discussions psychological descriptions tend to feature prominently. I even posted a video explaining lutalica, a neologism that describes “the part of your identity that does not fit into any category”. In short, we have spent some time going over personality types and we've done it in many ways (using adjectives like outgoing or creepy and nouns such as daredevil or nationalist).

So far so good? Okay. That’s why we are now going to sail in rather shallow waters: physical descriptions. Whether you like them or not, physical descriptions are necessary and can be explored from a virtually endless number of angles.

For those of you that need a vocabulary fix I've decided to share this short list of basic phrasal verbs that may come in handy:

Bear in mind that, when we discussed risk-takers, we focussed on a particular kind of person and when we considered holiday options we ended up explaining how "certain vacations are for certain types". It is somehow inevitable, isn't it? I do hope you get used to this because we're going to do a lot of revising.

N.B. Avanzado 2 students: don’t forget the essay (“Do opposites attract?”) is due before the Xmas break.

Beautiful concepts

You know those standalone episodes in TV series? This is going to be just that: a post that has no connection to our English course in Laredo. Here goes.

As you all know I’ve always been fascinated by words. I remember the first time I saw mamihlapinatapei in the Guinness Book of Records. I was twelve, I think. It really opened my eyes, mostly because it allowed me to understand that not every idea, feeling or thought could be captured in one single word. Learning a second language helped me appreciate some wonderful vocabulary. It must have been then that I realized that my own mother tongue has some amazing words that nobody ever uses. Some are incredibly specific (himplar) some others are just stimulating (ucronía). So I started learning other languages and woke up to some great vocabulary in Basque, German, French and Italian. It became quite obvious that every language was a treasure trove of amazing concepts. Thanks to this new awareness I decided to look for interesting ideas in languages that I didn’t speak. I bought as many books on the subject as I could possibly find. The process turned out to be quite a humbling experience.

Today everything is a little easier. The Internet is chock-full of sites that claim to offer endless lists of untranslatable words. Some of those magic terms are truly impossible to encapsulate in one Spanish or English word. Think of ilunga, a noun in the Tshiluba language, which describes a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time. Some other hard-to-translate words have been glamorized out of proportion like the Portuguese feeling of saudade or the Russian toska.

I still collect beautiful concepts trapped in beautiful words and have even tried my hand at inventing some of those myself. So I’m used to all kinds of neologisms: quirky, whimsical, technical, poetic… Believe it or not I’m not alone. There are many word inventors out there who decide to coin terms they feel are missing from their own languages. One such creator is John Koenig.

On his website he publishes lots of thought-provoking made-up words. The thing that sets him apart from other word creators is his decision to write poetic explanations of those neologisms and then edit beautiful inspiring videos that perfectly illustrate those terms. His concepts are, for the most part, quite relatable: who has not experienced the desire to disappear or the feeling that time goes faster? I don’t know if you are as fascinated by language as I am but I personally find the discovery of words to be an enriching, mind-broadening adventure. Every language is an attempt to describe human experience. I goes without saying, no language has ever been successful in that regard. They all fail and yet artists like John Koenig keep trying to fill the gaps, reach further and fail again, fail a little bit better. The video below these lines is about lutalica, a word he invented to describe the part of your identity that does not fit into categories. Enjoy.

The most beautiful places in the world

Bonan tagon!

So far we have discussed personal descriptions in a number of ways. The grammatical approach helped us realize that we can define somebody by using a noun (she’s a genius) and adjective (he’s trustworthy) or a whole phrase (Jo is someone I can talk to). We have also tackled character traits and physical appearances (just remember the clip about women’s beauty throughout history and men’s beauty in different cultures). For those of you who are willing to go the extra mile and pick up some more vocabulary here is an interesting video that presents some beauty standards that may seem shocking in this part of the world.

Anyway, soon we’re going to deal with beautiful places. Not people. In anticipation of the inevitable classroom conversations here is one of the zillions of lists that clutter the Internet. The actual contents of the list are, of course, debatable but the vocabulary it shows may come in handy.