I know exactly what I mean. I just can’t think of the word for it
Writing for the Times last week I found myself bogged down in a patch of linguistic mud. I had begun a sentence thus: ‘Discussing a mutual acquaintance who keeps breaking into foul-mouthed language at inappropriate moments’ ... — and then couldn’t quite lay my hands on the word I wanted next, though it seemed to be on the tip of my tongue. It meant (this word) ‘the person I was talking to’.
So I continued to write, inserting within square brackets ‘the person I was talking to’, and hoping the right word would come to me before I filed the column.
It didn’t. So I simply had to remove the square brackets. The piece as published continued ‘... the person I was talking to remarked... ’ (etc), which was perfectly clear, but gratingly inelegant. The word never did come to me, and I have had to conclude that the English language has no single noun in vernacular use to describe what we might call a ‘co-conversationalist’: the person talking to, or discussing something with, someone else.
For written exchanges two people can be ‘correspondents’ with each other — but for verbal exchanges, there is no suitable equivalent. ‘Collocutor’ exists but sounds bizarre. The French have ‘interlocuteur/interlocutrice’ (‘personne qui converse avec une autre’) and though to our ears this sounds cumbersome, in France the word is apparently in vernacular use. Our own ‘interlocutor’ has a hopelessly pompous ring.
Rich in whole ranges of words for things, our tongue does have a few surprising gaps. Another is a word for ‘the person arguing or debating against’ someone. We have ‘protagonist’, but ‘antagonist’ will not serve as the flip-side, and ‘disputant’ is not quite right. Both these missing words would be, if they existed, particularly useful for journalists and for any writer who must make a report.
The 18th-century philosopher David Hume discussed at length whether we humans could ever conjure from our imagination a sensory perception we have not ourselves experienced — or, rather, whether everything we can imagine must be (or be constructed from) something we have experienced. Hume posited a colour-chart of shades of blue, from the palest to the deepest, with just one frame, one shade, miss ing. Could we imagine this, a colour we had never seen except in our mind’s eye? We can, for instance, imagine easily enough the missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle, by interpolation from its surroundings.
There are some in the field of linguistic philosophy who, asking the comparable question — ‘Can we imagine a thing for which there is no word?’ — would answer strictly No. We struggle (they say) to think things for which we have no word or name. Such linguistical experts conclude that our language constrains what we are able to think.
This must be true up to a point. But I have a very clear idea of what it is I want the word for when I fumble for something like ‘coconversationalist’ — as though in another life or a parallel world an English word does exist and I am reaching for it but (just) failing to grasp it. Purists in linguistic philosophy would reply that this is because we do have words from which we can construct the idea — ‘the person I was talking to’ — and so all we are seeking is a single-word shorthand way of condensing the existing meaning of a longer phrase or list.
But then again, while learning a foreign language we often come upon a word for which we don’t have a word at all, and yet we can sometimes get the feel for it at once, see how useful it is, and understand our lack.
A friend, for instance, once told me there’s an excellent Yiddish word to denote, in a woman, a combination of limited intellect with instinctive guile: ‘a stupid but cunning woman’ would be the longhand, and though in English the two halves of the conjunction seem logically at odds with each other, we can at once see (can’t we?) the human type to which this refers. It needs a word, and though I’m unable to confirm that the Yiddish one exists, it should; and my attempts to track it down, however unsuccessful, have given me a sniff of a marvellous language which seems to abound in expressions you didn’t know you needed until you saw them. ‘Doppess’, apparently, means ‘a uselessly commiserating bystander’.
In my childhood in Africa I learned a Chishona word for that heavy, falling, gently soaking, soft, soft mountain mist that wetly caresses your face, and isn’t quite fog and isn’t quite drizzle: ‘guti’ — a lovely and useful expression for which there is no English equivalent. And (from my African boyhood too) the Afrikaans word ‘lekker’, though translatable into English as ‘nice/ good/great/tasty’, conveys so much more of the intended lick-smacking quality than any of those English words.
Fifty years later, in my four-month sojourn among the French in the sub-Antarctic eight years ago, I was surprised to learn that that indispensable English word ‘shy’ is almost impossible to translate accurately and sensitively into French. My friends in Kerguelen told me that ‘timide’ was the word I was looking for, but that term is also used for ‘fearful’ or even ‘cowardly’; whereas ‘shy’, which is quite an affectionate expression in English, has no such connotations. You can be both brave and shy in English. Perhaps I have been misinformed and there does exist a French adjective for that winning human quality of social diffidence: an adjective carrying no suggestion of pusillanimity. If so, I never heard it.
No doubt there are French words we could usefully do with in our own tongue, yet cannot simply translate (though we have tended simply to incorporate these); sympathique is often cited as an example and we are conscious of its loss in translation; but a subtler loss arises (and I reflected often on this in Kerguelen) in any attempt to translate into English that wonderful, warm, inclusive, relaxed French word ‘génial’, when used of a social occasion.
I am making a list of missing English words. If you know of any, do drop me a line and I will add it. Top of that list, of course, is a word to describe a much-needed word which doesn’t exist.
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