Tingo

Here’s something I’d like for my birthday - The Meaning of Tingo: And Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World. I haven’t studied a foreign language since high school, but one thing I remember enjoying was learning words and expressions that had no exact equivalent in English. From what I can tell this book is a collection of such words from around the world. Here are a few samples from a description of the book:

Olfrygt - how the Danish describe the nagging fear of being unable to find a beer while out of town

Neko-neko - the Indonesian word for someone with a novel idea that actually makes the situation worse

Tingo - in Pascuense, to take all the objects one desires from the house of a friend, one at a time, by borrowing them