SYNDICATED COLUMN: America is one of the Few Cultures with Insults for Smart People
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There was controversy about it, but the Inuit famously and really do have at least 50 words for snow. The Scots have 241! The Sami people of northern Scandinavia and Russia use more than 1000 words for reindeer. Sanskrit, the language of the Kama Sutra, offers 267 words for love. Languages tend to evolve to reflect the cultural and practical priorities of the societies that speak them. This linguistic truism came to mind recently when, as part of research for one of my cartoons, I turned to Google Translate in search of a French translation for the English word “geek.” There wasn’t one. Nor in Spanish. All the Romance languages came up short; Google suggested “disadattato” in Italian, but that’s different — it means “misfit,” or “a person who is poorly adapted to a situation or environment.” A “geek” — “a person often of an intellectual bent who is disliked,” according to Merriam-Webster — is decidedly distinct from a misfit.…
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