Egbert was able to further demonstrate how the word itself has undergone a transformative journey — what linguists call “semantic drift.” It wasn’t so long ago that Americans mostly used “journey” to mean a literal trip, whereas now it’s more popular as a metaphor. Egbert demonstrated this by searching the more than one billion words in a database

... See more

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

-Clear boundaries: the wiki domain, and those who can edit it.

• unnameable — a shape-shifting thing that can’t be categorized or reliably identified, OR, something so horrific that you don’t want to give it a name because a name gives it a hook to lodge itself into your mind.

• transcendence — the act of “escaping inclusion within"; to surpass, climb over, go beyond, surmount, overstep; to molt, to escape a membr

... See more