Cutre

According to Global Language Monitor, the average native English speaker has a vocabulary of 14,000 words, a bleak number considering the English language lacks just 5,742 neologisms before it reaches the million-word mark. With so many options, it seems we would have a name for each nuance of our existence, each peculiar food combination, every shading of emotion, each time we seek extreme social withdrawal through isolation and confinement due to various personal social factors in our life (the Japanese term hikikomori).

If you've studied a foreign language, you probably remember how once you got beyond banal phrases like "I live in a house," "I eat vegetables," and "It is windy today," the language began to unfold. You began to get glimpses into another culture without stepping on a plane. The more vocabulary you learned, the more insight you had into a different way of looking at the world.

Perhaps you even came across a framework to help interpret and pinpoint your own view of the world and your place in it (the German term Weltanschauung).

As our world expands, its languages grow, continuously adopting new concepts and phrases. English has borrowed and appropriated a slew of words that slipped into the vernacular faster than you can say "attaccabottone" (Italian for someone who buttonholes, or traps you in a corner while they blather on and on). For example, who among us hasn't used the term macho to describe a chauvinist, unsubtle alpha male (and in doing so reversed the Spanish sense of the word with the more positive connotations "courageous" and "valorous")? And what soul-searching, angsty teen (an English term adopted by cultures around the world) hasn't privately declared himself a nihilist, a concept first introduced to English speakers in a translation of Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. And we all experience a bit of Schadenfreude (German, gratification obtained from the troubles of others) when some self-righteous, hypocritical politician finally gets his comeuppance.

Mining foreign languages for their untranslatable words can not only help advance global understanding, it can also help you learn a bit about yourself, as I did when I listed a few of my favorites.

• Tatemae (Japanese): Public facade. What is expected by society and required according to one's position and circumstances. This may or may not match one's honne (see below).
• Honne (Japanese): A person's true feelings and desires. These may be contrary to what is expected by society or what is required according to one's position and circumstances. In Japan people often keep their honnes hidden from others, even family members and friends.
• Cynefin (Welsh): Attraction to a familiar place or habitat.
• Fernweh (German): The desire for new adventures in faraway, unknown places.
• Weltschmerz (German): The sorrow, disillusionment, and discontent experienced by someone who understands that the physical reality can never satisfy the demands of the mind.
• Enfant terrible (French): One who defies conventional, orthodox behavior, work, or thought.
• Cutre (Spanish): Anything that doesn't match your standards or taste (not necessarily bad or tacky, just different from what you find appealing).
• Poshlost (Russian): Vulgarity, triteness, commonplace. Vladimir Nabokov in a 1967 Paris Review interview defined this term as "corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic and dishonest pseudo-literature, these are obvious examples."