Wordie

Do you ever come across words in another language that make more sense than your native lexicon? I often find this when one foreign word feels like it gets to the essence of what several familiar words fail to capture. They are the kinds of words that give me pause. I sit with them and think where has this word been all my life? It's an aha moment. These words...they stay with me. When I find words that get to the heart of the matter, I adopt them because words are my passion. I'm all about poignantly and efficiently expressing myself.

In The Girl Who Smiled Beads, Wamariya talks about her katundu: her stuff, in a nutshell. But it's not just the miscellany or the detritus she's accumulated along the way, it's literally how she makes sense of her life. She refers to these fragments as primary sources. As such, they help her construct a narrative of her complicated history. I cannot stop thinking about this word. Katundu has taken its hold. It's so much more powerful than possessions or mementos or stuff. 

Titzia is another word once borrowed I now own. It's a lovely word with origins in the Bible. Noah's wife was often called Titzia. In Amharic, it means memory tinged with regret. So nostalgia, but more. Titzia embodies that sentiment more completely. I say it and I do so with yearning. It is not overused or cliche. It's powerful.

I find Yiddish powerful too, but also playful. Fun to say. So many of the words and phrases are mainstream now like verklempt and chutzpah and kvetsch, but I'm lucky that Linda shares the more obscure ones with me even though I am a goy.