While looking into words to write about this past weekend, it suddenly hit me that my column was actually some kind of amateur guinea pig experiment in sociolinguistics or sociology, or something. I may or may not have then had to quell a brief panic attack at the realization that my major had infiltrated my column. It's like when people tell you that your personal and professional lives shouldn't mix, and you're forced to rethink the wisdom of having slept with your boss for the past three months.
Okay, fine. So it's not like that. But I certainly had no intention at the outset to use this column as a soapbox from which I could parrot off the academic drivel that I roll my eyes at in class. Despite the inherent sociological aspects of this column, I'd like to think I've done a pretty good job of avoiding that. My writing has been refreshingly free of academic drivel and has instead been comprised of my own personal brand of drivel.
But I learned a fascinating word over the weekend that made me want to relax my standards for just one column. "Verg??enza" is a Spanish Spanish word that roughly translates to something between embarrassment, shame and guilt. And no, the double "Spanish" was not a typo -- "verg??enza" is a Spanish word used in Spain and may, or may not, have the same connotation in Latin American Spanish.
A friend of a friend explained to me that the usage of "verg??enza" is almost poetic in its rarity. The example he gave me was this: When you're climbing a flight of stairs, and you trip and fall, that's embarrassing. When you're climbing a flight of stairs, and you accidentally trip someone else and they fall, you feel guilty. But when you're climbing a flight of stairs and you trip and fall -- which in turn causes someone else climbing the stairs to trip and fall -- that's "verg??enza" because not only have you made an ass of yourself, but you've made an ass of them as well.
As interesting as the word is in itself, what's truly fascinating about it, my new friend explained to me -- and this is where I'm going to go all sociology major on y'all -- is that "verg??enza" serves as an example of how different cultures experience different emotions.
Wait, hold up. What? Yep! I found a rather interesting academic paper (which should be taken with a grain of salt, as there are always researchers with dissenting opinions) explaining that while autonomic, biological responses inform basic and fundamental emotional responses -- fear, anger, depression and satisfaction -- it is the combination of both biology and social interaction that gives rise to more complex emotions. Different cultures experience an array of unique social situations and those cultures will give names to the specific emotions that they experience in those situations. Because of that, there are words in most likely every language that express an emotion which can't be adequately translated simply because that specific emotion, and the attendant social situation, does not necessarily exist in other cultures.
I'm sure I could find literally thousands of examples of words like "verg??enza," and I'm not saying that one culture is an emotional alien to another. But I do think it's pretty cool that different cultures can feel different emotions than us just because they have a word to describe it and we don't. We may have an identical biological experience, but we can only give voice to what we're feeling through the language that we have to work with. Food for thought: Can polyglots experience a wider range of emotions than those who can only speak one language?
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Falcon Reese is a junior majoring in sociology. He can be reached at Falcon.Reese@tufts.edu or on Twitter @falconreese
