Today’s blog is about these strange Dutch words.įoreigners in the video came with these words: Because for me, I sometimes don’t even notice it! But you also encounter a lot of strange and funny things.Īs an online Dutch teacher I’m always interested to see what you thought were strange Dutch words. It combines the Norwegian word kveis (“uneasiness following debauchery”) with the Greek word for pain.Ī version of this story ran in 2017 it has been updated for 2022.Studying Dutch means learning the grammar and important words. This fancy word for hangover was coined in a 2000 paper in a medical journal. Overdid it last night? Just explain to your boss that you’ve got a bit of veisalgia. People aren’t very impressed by shin splints, but they might be impressed by medial tibial stress syndrome. CrepitusĪll that popping, creaking, and cracking of joints when you get out of bed in the morning goes by the name of crepitus, from the Latin for “rattle, crack.” The word decrepit goes back to the same root. When your nose is running while you’re spooning in that spicy soup, you’ve got gustatory rhinitis. The Latin horrere originally referred to bristling, or hair standing on end, a sense captured by the word for goose bumps, horripilation. BorborygmiĪll that rumbling and gurgling in the stomach and guts goes by the name borborygmi. If a dizzy, head rush feeling is brought on by standing up too fast, it’s orthostatic hypotension. Tightly laced corsets only make it worse. If you faint at the sight of blood or upon hearing some shocking news, it’s probably vasovagal syncope, an automatic response mediated by the vagus nerve. If you have accidents during the day it’s diurnal enuresis. If you wet the bed at night it’s nocturnal enuresis. What are those little transparent threads you can see floating across your eyeball when you pay close attention? Just muscae volitantes (“flying flies”) the name for the little bits of protein or other material in the jelly inside your eye. The more rhythmic diaphragm action of the hiccup is a synchronous diaphragmatic flutter. Getting the wind knocked out of you feels bad, but doesn’t last very long. You know how sometimes you bite the inside of your cheek by accident, and then you get that little ridge of tissue that sticks out so that you end up biting it again and again? That’s morsicatio buccarum, baby. Aphthous StomatitisĪphthous stomatitis, the word for canker sores, is hard to say even without canker sores. If you want to go Greek when describing your ingrown toenail, it’s onychocryptosis (“hidden nail”), but if you prefer Latin, stick with unguis incarnatus (“nail in flesh”). It has a big name to match that big feeling: transient lingual papillitis. One tiny, swollen taste bud looks like no big deal in the mirror, but feels distractingly humongous in your mouth. That callus on your foot may be soft, in which case it’s a heloma molle. If you ever feel the sudden flutter under your skin from a small bundle of muscle fibers spontaneously contracting, you can say you’re experiencing fasciculation (from fasciculus, “little bundle”). Say this term for an ice cream headache five times fast to warm up your mouth and relieve the brain freeze. It is followed by a pricking, tingling sensation called paresthesia. That numb feeling that you wake to when you’ve slept on your arm wrong is obdormition. Give your complaints some interesting heft with these fancy medical terms for commonplace problems. Your health issues might be mundane, but that’s no reason to be boring.
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