More than the horses, camels, goats, fantastic characters, and breathtaking landscape, one vocabulary lesson from that visit changed me forever.

You talk like a baby!

My host, Gerel, was welcoming, with a kind sense of humor directed at her bumbling guest. My Mongolian language skills were roughly those of a three-year-old, and many of my memories from that time are of her and I nearly crying with laughter trying to communicate the simplest things.

I had brought groceries to share with the family, stored in my tent. (The family was bewildered that I would want to sleep alone in the little yellow ger, but that is a different story.) One morning, at breakfast, the family was out of bread. I had some, so I hopped up, saying that I would get minii talkh (my bread).

Again, Gerel laughed at me. “Andryei! Chi khuukhed shig yaridag yum baina!” (Andrea! You talk like a baby!)

In my stumbling Mongolian, I asked what she meant.

Her partially translated reply: “Minii, minii, minii! Only a baby talks like this! An adult says manai.”

I had not learned that word. What followed was a comedic communication of mixed Mongolian and hand gestures, and I came away with a translation of manai as meaning “mine, but also ours.” The dictionary translates this as “our,” but that’s not quite right. It’s one of those words that defies translation because English speakers lack the nuanced concept, along with the word. The closest corollary is the way we might say “our mom” when speaking to a sibling, but “my mom” when speaking to a stranger.

Mine but also ours. THAT is how an adult speaks in Mongolia—mine, but also ours. Never mine mine mine. Can you imagine the difference that one simple word would make, if English speaking cultures understood that an adult says manai?

Buckets that Carry Values

English, fast becoming the global language, lacks the nuance embedded in many other languages, and where we lack, we borrow. Zeitgeist, schadenfreude, hygge, kintsugi—all words from other languages to put an easy handle on meanings that are otherwise just misty notions to a native English speaker and, like mist, impossible to grasp. Each time one of these highly charged foreign words enters the lexicon, it’s as if a room opens up in our shared cultural house, and we become all the richer.

The concept of kintsugi—more beautiful for having been broken—alters the conversation and experience of trauma and healing. Those of us who delight in looking out the window at the cold and dark while drinking hot cocoa by the fire now have hygge, and no longer need to justify our experience to the sun seekers.

In the most famous example, the Greeks have many words for love, among them: eros, philia, agape, mania. How tragic—how sadly telling—is it that English speakers have only one word for the whole palette of possible loves? I love my wife. I love my car. All writers in English have wrestled with our non-existent vocabulary of smiles. (Do NOT get me started with your wry grins.) Yet Japanese has upwards of ten words for different kinds of smiles. What does it mean that we have given so little attention to the concepts of love and smiles that we have only one-tenth of the nuanced meaning possessed by other languages?

Vietnamese has something like nine different versions of the word “I” depending on who the speaker is addressing. Consider that, for a moment: when speaking (and thinking) in Vietnamese, self cannot be expressed without relationship to other.

I could go on, but you get my point: language forces us to encode the values smuggled inside it.

Coo coo ca choo

Language, at its very best, can be a condenser of meaning. An entire story, with all its emotion and nuance, can be thrown into the hopper and made molten, crafted into a blade that cracks open a deeper understanding.

Years ago, in college, a male student struck up a close friendship with a much older student in her forties. The two were seen everywhere together: in the art labs, the campus café, the library. On one particular day, a group of us had been working quietly in the ceramics studio—focusing on our respective pots and sculptures—when the woman of this duo cleaned up her things and left. The young man slipped out after her.

The woman next to me paused her potter’s wheel and stage whispered: “Coo coo ca choo.”

That wedge of condensed meaning cracked open the geode of all our private suspicions, and the whole studio burst into laughter to the point of tears—not because of the couple (though, a little bit about the couple) but because of the way it felt to have THAT MUCH COLLECTIVE MEANING thrust so suddenly into our midst.

Of course, only someone my age or older would understand the reference. For a younger audience, consider the words “Amaze! Amaze!” in this year 2026, and you will get my meaning. A shared meme, in literature and art, along with social media, is a powerful punch of contextual meaning. We must read, watch, share in the collective story-making, or these meanings pass us by.

Mistakes Have Been Made

Language, and the way it is used by those in power, has very real consequences. First, in our perceptions, and then in the actions that we do or do not take based on those perceptions. Consider the difference in the way news might be framed:

Climate change
vs.
Climate collapse.

Both are true. Each has different urgency.

A young woman of fourteen was assaulted by a youth pastor.
vs.
Youth pastor John Smith raped a fourteen-year-old child.

A fourteen-year-old is not a woman, young or otherwise. The next time you see one of these stories in the news (and I’m betting you’ll see one this week) look for that passive victim who is somehow both fourteen and yet a woman responsible for the crime committed against her, and that misty, drifting perpetrator with a title but not a name.

And, speaking of the way our language regularly frames the feminine as a passive (and deserving) victim of assault? Consider this:

How different would our world be if we called the place that sustains us all Father Earth?

Would we be more hushed and respectful, as toward a distant, more punishing parent? Would we be more cognizant of consequences? Just wait 'til your father gets home! Would we own up to our crimes, or would we issue more press releases in passive voice as yet another support beam of our sustaining climate crumbles under our feet: Mistakes Have Been Made.

Manai House

This diatribe on language has been inspired by recent posts on social media in which fiction readers complain that using big words is ableist. One word that inspired this? The word diatribe.

There is a serious claim inside that silly one: hospital discharge instructions, safety notices, benefits forms—being easily understood is their whole job. I once read a Forest Service post referring to charismatic megafauna and benthic macroinvertebrates without explanation, when big animals and water bugs would have carried a lot more meaning for the public.

Knowing your audience is key to conveying meaning.

That being acknowledged, the entire point of reading fiction is to inhabit a larger world, in radical empathy with experiences and emotions not the reader’s own. To pick up a work of fiction is to say to the author, "Please, build me a larger house of meaning."

And the tool for that? Vocabulary.

You would not hire a contractor to build out your house and then limit them to the screwdriver you happen to have in your utility drawer. Refusing to access the built-in dictionary on e-readers or (God forbid) that Merriam-Webster on the shelf or the entire world of human knowledge available to us on our devices does not make the fiction author ableist. It makes that accusing reader lazy, indolent, slothful.

One might compare such a person to Skimpole, Oblomov, or—since this seems willful—Bartleby, letting the building be taken down around him. One might, but…

Sigh.

I would prefer not to.

The English language is a fantastic hodgepodge of words shared from other languages, and with them shared meanings, and shared depth of meaning. The author cannot translate schadenfreude as simply glee without blunting the edge of meaning. Our shared language is like a house—manai house—filled with endless rooms of experience and meaning, and that house of mystery can keep growing, so long as we keep opening doors.

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***Author's Note, To my Mongolian friends who read this: it is entirely possible that I have completely misunderstood manai, in which case, I apologize. What's more, I used Google translate to quote Gerel's words, as my Mongolian vocabulary is dissolving daily. Please correct me! It's very likely that mistakes were made.