In the 1980s, it reeked of the stock exchange: “buy-in,” “leverage,” “volatility.” The ’90s brought computer imagery: “bandwidth,” “ping me,” “let’s take this offline.” In the twenty-first century, with start-up culture and the dissolution of work-life separation (the Google ball pits and in-office massage therapists) in combination with movements

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These words, past their initial intrigue, offer us a looking glass into specific cultures. After all, for a culture to come up with a word, something must happen often enough. And for it not to exist in other cultures, it must not have passed that intangible threshold. This very concept means that with untranslatables, we very likely experiencing a... See more