@Muse - Finnish?? If we were doing car racing, the next question would be: First or last?

My favorite other language is Yiddish - it has so many great words!!! My grandmother called me a nudnik (and we have a cat of that name.)

Apropos berries - my wife used to try to take me to play golf. Apart from me thinking "gee, swinging at the ball is fun, so I should maximize my stroke count" I would wander off to much on berries growing along the edges of the course. Of course I would only pick ones at shoulder height, none lower (you know how golfers are when there are no "facilities" near by.)

Once upon a time I was at one of the beaches on the San Mateo coast and we happened upon a llama - the animal kind, not the Tibetan kind - and that llama was drinking water from a pot, a very nice cooking pot. When we finished our hike the llama was gone. Where did it go? We had not seen any llamas hitchhiking that day, so I suspected alien abduction. But the pot was still there!! So we grabbed the pot (remember, I am a nudnik), found a giant patch of ripe blackberries, and filled the pot - and it was a rather large pot - to the brim. Later on that day we got home, washed the berries, and I ate until I got very sick - did I came down with beriberi?

Oh Yiddish is full of marvelous expressions and words.

Right now, I think the word of the moment is פֿאַרקאַקטע (farkakte) Crappy, fouled up. Pooped on.

Well, you get the idea.

I have become rather fond of the Japanese word Ikigai (生き甲斐)

It means "the reason you get up in the morning", i.e., your purpose in life. This concept has been credited as one reason Japanese people often live to an advanced age. Unlike us here in the West, they never retire, but always keep a purpose - a reason to keep breathing.

Right now I'm struggling to rediscover my Ikigai.

According to Ogden Nash, "The one-l lama, He's a priest. The two-l llama, He's a beast. And I will bet A silk pajama There isn't any three-l lllama."

I don't really have any favorite words in German, the only non-English language I attempt to study.

At our little Seattle house, we had marionberries and raspberries growing along the south side of the house. Our little doggie would gently pluck and eat the lower ripe ones, but only while we were also picking them. So polite. In season, I would fill a heaping bowl of berries in the morning before going to work, then another one in the evening when I got back from work. I'm not even much of a berry person. A small handful in a bowl with a couple scoops of vanilla ice cream is good for me.

@Christoph S @Joyce Donahue, you might be interested in this funny Finnish word: Kalsarikännit

It translates as "pants drunk", meaning you are at home alone drunk and only wearing your underpants!

Add me to the list of fans of "schadenfreude". Younger me felt a twinge of sorrow for folks who fell into the cow pile of their own making. Old me mostly says sucks to be you.

A word that I knew existed and knew what it meant, but always had to look it up when I wanted to use it, is kintsugi. The best way to embed it in my brain is to do it, right? Currently awaiting materials, stay tuned.

not sure how I missed the last paragraph of the topic

I'm married because of blackberries 🤣

lol @Muse... I met Mr. Stranger at the first event I went to after I quit smoking. It was a mid-afternoon fundraiser type thing with beer and set-ups. I'm not a beer person, so I brought a flask of my then-favorite libation, blackberry brandy, and mixed it with the provided soft drinks. Nobody warned me about the tendency to sub the hand-to-mouth of smoking with sips of a drink. 🥴 And he was already a traffic cop, so he knew I was plastered. (He also knew I had a ride with mutual friends.)

Turned out I had taken a phone call from him the night before that didn't go well. I was just loose enough to give him some playful hell for it.

We both had to work that night. That rotten sonofabitch called me at 3 in the morning to ask how I was feeling 😜

He was on a "date" with another woman at the event 😏
(turned out he was her beard—he didn't tell me til he was sure he could trust me with the secret (keep in mind this was in the 80s))

anywho we have sort of a running gag about blackberries now 🤣