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The English language has efficiently borrowed a number of words and phrases from the French, including dossier, déjà vu, liaison and bourgeois. Our own words—file? dreamy flashback? relationship? hopelessly middle class?—somehow fail to embody the subtlety and profundity of their French equivalents; indeed, they lack a certain "je ne sais quoi".

These elegant French infusions follow something of a pattern. The English language lacks its own versions of risqué, laissez-faire, and sommelier—words that reflect French culture in a way that so-called "soul food" evokes the American south.

Take écoeurant, for example. Often understood as the French version of the English word "nauseating", écoeurant is an adjective that describes the way one feels when one about to (or wants to) vomit. The subtle difference between the two, however, lies in the cause of the nausea. Whereas "nauseating" can refer to any sensation that involves nausea, écoeurant describes a type of nausea caused by experiencing too much of something—a creamy dessert, a powerful odour, an obsequious personality. You can have nauseating hunger pangs, but you certainly cannot have a hunger that is écoeurant.  read more »

Genuine lovers of language already have on their shelves books by linguists and psychologists, such as David Crystal and Steven Pinker; or erudite tomes such as Nicholas Ostler’s ambitious “Empires of the Word”, a history of the world told through its languages. That leaves plenty of space on the coffee table or in the guest lavatory for a witty but shorter and easier read. Jag Bhalla’s book, enlivened with illustrations by Julia Suits, a New Yorker cartoonist, seems ideally suited.

Bhalla, a self-confessed monoglot, has collected idioms from the four corners of the world (eight corners, in Hindi) and returned, as he puts it, with “souvenir collections of linguistic gems". Why would the Germans have a single word that means the “disappointment one feels when something turns out not nearly as badly as one had expected”? Something about that seems quintessentially German, as Bhalla muses.

The official definition of an idiom, he explains, is “a group of words always used together as a phrase, where the meaning of the phrase isn’t clear from the meaning of the words in it.” For example, he kicked the bucket (or, in French, “he passed his weapon to the left” or “she swallowed her birth certificate”). Idioms are therefore “presolved cryptic word puzzles” or “fossilised metaphors” whose meanings were clear when they were coined but have since taken on a life of their own.  read more »

Language is a mess. We miscommunicate constantly. Our different languages cause misunderstanding and distrust, and new languages are famously hard to learn in adulthood.  Invented languages are meant to solve these problems, so you’d think professional linguists would take interest. Yet academic linguists tend to file the subject of invented languages under “don’t go there.” Real, natural human communication is their interest—not the dreamers who learn Esperanto or the dorks who learn Klingon.  read more »

Dear America,

This week someone from Education (it would be) said to me, "I am comfortable with my belief-systems."

I blame you, collectively, for this. I think of myself as a pro-American Brit in almost everything, and I trust my instincts. When I was researching my Malamud biography I regularly visited Fine and Shapiro’s deli on W72nd Street as my resort of choice (chopped liver and salami, okay). Only later did an interviewee tell me it was in fact Malamud’s own favorite (but increasingly alas, just tuna).

Still, I blame you for the increasing usage over here of "comfortable". It’s turned belief into a cosy chintz chair with fluffy cushions. "Please, do make yourself comfortable."

Please do not. This comfortable stuff is a corruption of the old religious language. I love the blessing upon the child

May the Lord bless you and comfort you, and make His face to shine unto you.

I love the healing words of Christ in the great Authorized Version:

Daughter be of good comfort; thy faith hath made thee whole.

But comfort is what you pray for, what you might even be given, in trouble—not what you make
for yourself in Feng Shui world. Don’t pick up your bed and walk; lie down and get comfy.

But perhaps it isn’t entirely your fault. It must be you, America, that also invented the "comfort zone". As in "get out of your ... ".

Extraordinary diverse Nation, how did you manage to invent both? And in what order?

But for God’s sake (and I almost mean that, if I was sure about myself), "For God's sake", I wanted to say to my Educationalist, "Comfortable with your belief-systems! That is why they are systems, designed as such for your precious comfort."

We have a student questionnaire we hand round in our university (it’s one of our systems) and it asks the question:

Was the level of your seminar:

a) Too Hard?

b) Just Right?

c) Too Easy?

It is like Goldilocks and the Three Bears and all that porridge. That is what Aristotle’s golden mean has come to—the "Just Right" of comfortable warm porridge. There is no tick-box on the questionnaire for "Hard", as if that (let alone "Too Hard") might be an honourable goal.

Beliefs are not things you can simply choose. Beliefs may be closer to fear than to therapy, more like surprised energy than lazy security. The etymology tells you it is more about strengths, albeit found amidst weaknesses, than about luxuries.

Friends of the Blog, remember that great American, William James, in "The Varieties of Religious Experience":

We have a thought, or we perform an act, repeatedly, but on a certain day the real meaning of the thought peals through us for the first time, or the act has suddenly turned into a moral impossibility. All we know is that there are dead feelings, dead ideas, and cold beliefs, and there are hot and live ones; and when one grows hot and alive within us, everything has to re-crystallize about it.

Light up, not lighten up.

Philip Davis

Philip Davis is professor of English literature at Liverpool University, author of "Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life", and editor of The Reader.