Words I wish we had in (American) English

There’s no shortage of articles that talk about words in other languages that we don’t have in English. For example, the Mental Floss site has an article “51 Wonderful Words With No English Equivalent,” or there’s “20 amazing words that don’t exist in English — but really should” on the Insider site. You get the idea.

I also think that there are amazing words in English that we don’t use, where “we” is, for purposes of today, people who live in the United States. I occasionally run across a term in British English, say, that seems so useful that it seems unfortunate that we haven’t adopted it in American English.

Here are a few of those terms.

fortnight, forthnightly. Americans don’t have a good word for a two-week period. In the UK, they go on “a fortnight’s holiday,” which seems more straightforward, somehow, than saying “a two-week vacation.” (By the way, fortnight derives from “fourteen nights,” aka, two weeks.)

The term fortnight is even more useful to talk about something that happens every other week. Technically, we have the term biweekly, but there’s enough confusion about what that means that you can’t be absolutely sure that people understand you mean every other week and not twice a week. But if you say “every fortnight” or “once a fortnight,” it’s unambiguous.

prepone. If you want to delay a meeting, you can tell folks that you want to postpone it. But if you want to have the meeting earlier than planned, you have to use workarounds. You can say that you want to “move the meeting up,” but there’s enough fuzziness around what up means that you’ll often have to clarify. In South Asian English, though, they have a perfect term: prepone. This is exactly the opposite of postpone, so that if you want to “prepone the meeting 2 hours,” it’s perfectly clear what you mean.

naff. This is a slang word in UK English that means “lacking in style or good taste; vulgar and unfashionable.” But that doesn’t entirely capture the full range of this word and why it’s useful. According to a piece on the BBC site, the usage also encompasses “uncool,” “of poor quality,” and as “a general dismissive term.” Examples from the article of using naff include:

Those clothes are naff.
That software is naff.
That pub is naff.

I suspect that this usage overlaps significantly with the slang use in the US of the term lame in the sense of “pathetic.” But naff doesn’t have disadvantage of being an ableist term. (It’s not entirely clear where naff came from, but a lot of people think it came out of Polari, a language used by various subcultures in Britain.)

The word naff also has a verbal form, usually expressed as naff off, a G-rated version of something like fuck off. And people who are screwing around are said to be naffing (“quit naffing about”).

All in all, naff seems like an excellent multi-purpose term that we should welcome and encourage in American English.

I’m sure there are many more terms used in other Englishes that likely would be very handy to adopt into American English. I can’t think of any more at the moment, but perhaps you can—if so, let me know!