Is any word untranslatable? (Lucy Greaves, The Guardian)

There are some fantastic words that would make welcome additions to English: who among us hasn’t experienced tsundoku?

The Spanish have a magnificent phrase: “cursi como un repollo con lazo”. Photograph: Alamy.

Not long ago I was given the task of presenting an untranslatable word at an event at the Free Word Centre, where I am translator in residence. This interest in untranslatable words, which ties into one of the centre’s new lines of inquiry, The Power of Translation, began last year with a blog that compiled untranslatable words from different languages. There were some fantastic words that would arguably make welcome additions to English: who among us hasn’t experienced tsundoku, for example, the Japanese word for “the act of leaving a book unread after buying it, typically piling it up together with other such unread books”.

Word up (Matt Seaton, The Guardian)

Ask yourself: when you make a statement, does it sound more like a question because your voice gets higher at the end of the sentence? If so, you are suffering from HRT (high-rise terminals), a speech habit that is taking over the way we talk. Matt Seaton goes in search of the culprits.

Slate

Do you use HRT? More and more people do these days. All over the world, in fact – in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand – and it’s on the increase over here, too. Naturally, it’s mainly young people that use HRT: teenagers, of course, but more and more pre-teens are doing it as well. There are even some adults who have either grown up using it or who are getting HRT off their kids.

Excuse me? HRT stands for high-rise terminals. What did you think I meant? It’s the technical term for “uptalk” – the way kids speak so that every sentence ends with an interrogative tone so that it sounds like a question even when it’s a statement? Like that, in fact.