Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Words of the Day

Thanks to Mariecel, a friend who lives in Berlin, I have found two new words that I think need to be incorporated into the English language:

Fernweh: the opposite of heimweh, homesickness. The desire to travel to far lands. Similar in meaning to wanderlust (also a German word), without the negative connotations of shiftlessness that it has.

Wortschatz: word treasure. Used to describe the treasure that is one's vocabulary, no matter the size. You can have a small, medium, or large wortschatz, but no matter the richness, it remains a prize to be appreciated.

Although English has a huge variety of words, these ones capture in one word ideas that take a lot more to express in English. I think fernweh is an absolutely perfect word to describe something that I feel so often, and I think I'm going to have to use it often enough that the OED notices and puts it in the dictionary! Not going to happen, but a girl can dream, right?

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