flâneur

On the poverty of names

stanforddaily.com · 968 words · saved by 1 readers

Our attempts to articulate the untranslatable are as futile as they are necessary, writes Baroudi.

Sometimes, the words I reach for feel too worn-out to carry what I’m actually feeling. Like they’ve already belonged to too many other mouths and lost their sharpness, their intimacy. I try to speak from a place that’s mine, but the language feels borrowed — and somehow not enough. Watch what happens when light moves through ice. Not the flat white of snow, but the deep glacial blue where pressure has compressed air into something dense and ancient. There’s a color there that exists nowhere else — electric, mineral, alive. No word holds it. “Azure” is too warm. “Cerulean” too soft. The ice…

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