The Meaning of Tingo: and Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World

Reading that is fun for anyone interested in languages and/or writing. As a writer I am always trying to make my language and therefore my thinking richer and subtler. "The Meaning of Tingo" helped, while giving enjoyment at the same time. I like an author with a sense of humour. But the main merit of the book is that, by encouraging an understanding of different cultures, it contributes to building a peace loving world.

As a native speaker of one of the less familiar languages mentioned in the book, I found the glosses to be oversimpilified at best and completely wrong at worst. It seems the author wanted to make a point and to do so, resorted to making the facts fit the explanation. Since the facts of one language have been distorted in this fashion, how is one to know that the facts of languages one has no knowledge of have been similarly distorted?
Reading about languages and their peculiarities is fun, but if the facts are not accurate, then the whole book is quite suspect. I do not recommend the book, unless you want to see how your language has been distorted.

If rated on sheer entertainment value, this book would earn 4.5 stars. Unfortunately, as has been documented in several internet fora, the author's credulity far outweighs his scholarship. Quite simply, an unhealthy percentage (at my estimate 20-30%) of the 'words' quoted in this book simply do not exist*. Thus, on scholarship, the book earns only 1.5 stars.

My 3-star overall rating represents an average of the 4.5 for entertainment value and 1.5 for scholarship.

* Two of the more egregious examples are the infamous 'razbliuto', alleged to be a Russian word meaning 'the sentimental feeling you have about someone you once loved but no longer do', but whose existence is denied by any native Russian-speaker, and 'Scheissenbedauern', an alleged German word for `the disappointment one feels when something turns out not nearly as badly as one had expected'. There is no such word as 'Scheissenbedauern' in German - nor could there be, as it doesn't even obey the standard rules of German for forming portmanteau words (it would have to be 'Scheissbedauern'). Even minimal checking on the author's part would have alerted him to the bogus nature of this entry. Unfortunately, it becomes clear that, time after time, the author failed to carry out even the most basic fact-checking for this book.

This book has a lot of amusing linguistic information in it. However a number of reviewers have pointed out that it has inaccuracies.
It also has a strange stress on a limited number of languages. I can appreciate for instance the author's passion for Yiddish, and the little paragrah he writes on ways of cursing and insulting in Yiddish- but I wonder at the total absence of Hebrew and Aramaic in this work.
There are little essays which are informative including one on languages which are threatened with extinction. Another discourses on the number of languages in the world. I was surprised to learn at how many different languages there are in Papua New Guinea.
I found the little section on especially long- words, compounds of various kinds also interesting.
This book has a lot of amusing information in, and should be treated as a work of entertainment not serious scholarship.

I keep the book out for anyone to read. People pick it up, read the cover, thumb through the book and grow a smile every time. Everyone finds a word that they were somehow living without. It's pretty fantastic to watch someone get attached to a word and use it. One comment was, "I had a buddy that tingoed my entire CD collection during my freshman year!"

My favorite today, Wabi, a flawed detail that enhances the elegance of the whole work of art.