If you haven’t read any of Bill Bryson’s work, you are a fool, a hermit, or a socially unacceptable combination of the two. I HIGHLY recommend his audio books. Hearing him read his own work is a snigger-fest. I think he's the fuddy-duddy (but charming) professorial version of Dave Barry.
I'm reading one of his grammar books (he writes travel, science, and language books) for the umpteenth time. You have to love a book that opens:
Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.
Excerpted from The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way by Bill Bryson:
“...The richness of English vocabulary, and the wealth of available synonyms, means that English speakers can often draw shades of distinction unavailable to non-English speakers. The French, for instance, cannot distinguish between house and home, between mind and brain, between man and gentleman, between “I wrote” and “I have written.” The Spanish cannot differentiate a chairman from a president, and the Italians have no equivalent of wishful thinking. In Russia there are no native words for efficiency, challenge, engagement ring, have fun, or take care...
...On the other hand, other languages have facilities that we lack...Portuguese has words that differentiate between an interior angle and an exterior one...The Italians even have a word for the mark left on a table by a moist glass (culacino) while the Gaelic speakers of Scotland, not to be outdone, have a word for the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whiskey. (Wouldn’t they just?) It’s sgriob And we have nothing in English to match the...French sang-froid, the Russian glasnost, or the Spanish macho, so we must borrow the term from them or do without the sentiment.”
Other terms we lack:
schadenfreude - (German) Delighting in another’s misfortune
sgiomlaireachd - (Highland Scottish) the habit of dropping in at mealtimes