What I Love About Untranslatable Words

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I love the concept that the word beautiful means something different to basically everyone. If you were to say, there's a beautiful mountain, the actual picture that people have in their heads when they hear that is going to be different. And so i find it just like this amazing looking glass into different cultures and what's happening in those cultures. Using that term again, where it almost gives us access to the fringes of human experience. Have this ike incredible level of complexity in nuance, and the words that we usually use don't quite capture that. A lot of people struggle in conflict, because they don't know how to actually describe what they're experiencing.

Language is one of the most powerful tools that humans have accessible to them.

Don't believe us? Consider the fact that someone could walk up to you and say something that could immediately change your mental state.

Nothing around you has changed, other than the words echoed through the air.

In this episode, Cal and Steph discuss the power of words and how language can shape the way we think. They use untranslatable words to convey these concepts and share how language has been shown to impact anything from our impression of time, space, or even emotional regularity.

If you're interested in digging into this more, Steph has built a directory of untranslatable words (Eunoia, which itself is an untranslatable word) and has written an article about the topic here. Send us a message with your favorite "untranslatables"!

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