Re-reading Making Money today.

[conuly]

"Trolls don't have a word for machismo in much the same way that puddles don't have a word for water."

Do you think that's a variant of the "Eskimos have 20 zillion words for snow" line? (BTW - they don't by any sensible view of the word (no more than we do, certainly), and it wouldn't matter if they did.)

Comments

[conuly]

We didn't have a word for "genocide" until pretty recently either, but we sure did it. If we didn't have a word for "freedom" or "love", that doesn't mean we couldn't want it. (And isn't that happier than doing genocide?)

[atdelphi.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. But it was a pretty common tactic during the Cold War to claim (falsely, or semi-falsely) that, say, the Russians didn't have a word for "freedom" or "privacy" or "compromise" as proof that they were the Borg.

As if we English speakers don't get ohrwurmer just because we don't have a nice neat word for it.

Pratchett much more sensibly points out that a lack of a word doesn't necessarily mean a lack of a quality - just a lack of alternatives to that quality necessitating a label to differentiate it.