Listeners to Today last week were fascinated by an item about foreign words with no equivalent in English that must be translated by a whole sentence. If brunch is an example of a portmanteau word, these are, I think, examples of holdall words, packed full of meaning. Merriam-Webster, the dictionary people, had asked for examples and hundreds came in.
One mentioned last week by Susie Dent, for 30 years the denizen of Dictionary Corner on Countdown, was ranço, from Brazilian Portuguese, with the apparent meaning ‘an irrational dislike of someone innocuous’. But, Brazilian or not, ranço means ‘rancidity’. It comes from Latin rancidus, which already meant ‘offensive’ in addition to the literally rancid. From the Latin rancor, ‘rancidity’, English derives rancour.
When Susie Dent had been in Dictionary Corner for only two years, Harold Bloom wrote: ‘In Iago and Edmund, as in Hedda, there is a playfulness gone rancid, and insofar as the sublime Falstaff yields to a certain rancidity, a trollishness appears in him also.’
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