You know how, every once in a while, you'll run across a great forgotten thing? Something you knew, but had tucked into a dark corner of your brain? Yeah. Well, we were doing a naming project recently, and tripped over "gestalt." And as Amy noted, there's really no synonym to this exceptionally awesome word. Plus it's fun to say. Go on, try it. Louder. There you go.
The English language relies heavily on German loanwords like gestalt, actually, and most of them are either synonym-less or so unique and cool there is no way the English equivalent can compare. It occurs to me that these expressive words have been cropping up in my brain lately. Here they are for you:
Top five awesome German words that make English words taste like dry crackers in your mouth:
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- schadenfreude
- Delight in the suffering of another. Ouch, I know. Not a kind or generous feeling, admittedly. But, once in a while, so much fun.
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- zeitgeist
- The spirit of the age and its society. Ours has changed, I believe.
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- gestalt
- A configuration of elements so unified as a whole that it cannot be described merely as a sum of its parts. Yeah, like Redhead.
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- neugierig
- Greedy for the new. Ok, this is not a loan word. But it should be. It is most often exhibited in 10-month-old babies whose mothers need them to sit still.
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- angst
- A neurotic feeling of anxiety. Those Germans, they must have had a lot of deadlines, too.
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