Mind your language | 1 December 2007

He’s the man who gave us The Meaning of Tingo, full of words that look funny in English (bum, Arabic for ‘owl’) or encapsulate an idea that it takes a sentence in English to explain. Very amusing it was too. My husband kept reading bits out while I was peeling the potatoes. Then doubts crept in. Could tingo, a word from Easter Island, really mean ‘to borrow things from a friend’s house, one by one, until there’s nothing left’? Mr Jacot de Boinod’s definition came from They Have a Word for It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases, by Howard Rheingold (1988). Mr Rheingold does not say ‘until there’s nothing left’, but he places tingo in ‘a strange borderland between breach of etiquette and high praise’, because if you admire a friend’s possession enough to ask for it, you pay the donor a supreme compliment.

So Mr Rheingold’s ‘meaning’ is an explanation of social context.