Grief Bacon

German has a word for the weight you put on from emotional eating. Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon.

English doesn't have one. We have to describe it, which takes a sentence and loses all the poetry. German also gives us Backpfeifengesicht, a face badly in need of a slap. Japanese has boketto, gazing vacantly into the distance without a thought in your head. Every language has gaps where another language has a word.

That's fun. What's more surprising is how far down the gaps go.

We tend to assume some words are universal, the basic equipment every language must have. Yes and no. Left and right. It turns out neither is guaranteed.

Irish and Scottish Gaelic have no single words for yes and no. Ask "Did you go out last night?" and the answer is an echo of the verb: "I went" or "I didn't go". Welsh does something similar.

In Guugu Yimithirr, spoken around Hope Vale in far north Queensland, speakers traditionally don't locate things with left and right at all. They use the compass. Your cup isn't on your left. It's north of you. Turn around and it's still north. Speakers keep track of direction constantly, which is a skill most English speakers lack completely.

Even emotions don't line up. In 2019, researchers published a study in Science comparing emotion words across nearly 2,500 languages. They found that languages group feelings differently. Some use one word where English uses two, and which feelings get grouped together depends on where the language comes from. "Love" or "anger" in one language isn't a perfect match for the word in another.

So there's no word, not even a basic one, that you can rely on meaning exactly the same thing to everyone. And that's true inside one language too.

"I love you" can mean several different things. So can "I love my new car". In a workplace, "urgent", "strategic", "quality" and "done" each mean something slightly different to every person in the meeting. Everyone nods, and everyone walks out with their own version.

The good news is that you get to decide what your words mean. The bad news is that if you don't explain it, your audience decides for you. Most of what we call communication problems are really meaning problems: two people using the same word and assuming they agreed.

So ask the boring question before the expensive mistake. When you say "done", what does done look like? When you say "urgent", by when?

Otherwise you'll end up with a project that's over budget, a team that's frustrated, and a little extra grief bacon.