Sometimes too the author embellished the story. St. Denis is the patron saint of France. He is supposed to have been the first bishop of Paris and to have suffered martyrdom through being beheaded. According to legend, he immediately stood up and walked a good distance, carrying his head in his hands, to the place where the church which bears his name is now situated, a little to the north of Paris. This was miraculous enough, you would have thought, but there are ways to improve on it. In later lives there are saints who do exactly the same thing, but walk even further or are accompanied by other beheaded martyrs also carrying their own heads. In fact this motif became so common that the experts have invented a special name for this kind of saint: cephalophores. This is from Greek, and of course means “headbearers.”

Janson’s “Natural History of Latin”

Jayus

Indonesian — “A joke so poorly told and so unfunny that one cannot help but laugh.”

Torschlusspanik

German — “Translated literally, this word means “gate-closing panic,” but its contextual meaning refers to “the fear of diminishing opportunities as one ages.” “

Iktsuarpok

Inuit — “To go outside to check if anyone is coming.”

Link shamelessly stolen from swiss-miss.

philosopheme phi·los·o·pheme
n.
A philosophical proposition, doctrine, or principle of reasoning.

lalochezia lal·o·che·zi·a (lāl’ō-kē’zē-ə)
n.
Emotional relief gained by using indecent or vulgar language.

Oxt Weekend is an experiment in engineering language by removing the ambiguous phrase “next weekend” and replacing it with “oxt weekend.”

A Sprachraum is the area in which a certain language is spoken. So, for example, the German Sprachraum would include the countries of Germany, Austria, and most of Switzerland. I’m so glad there’s a word for this!

Mamihlapinatapai is a word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the “most succinct word,” and is considered one of the hardest words to translate. It describes a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start. This could perhaps be translated more succinctly as “eye-contact implying ‘after you…’”. A more literal approximation is “ending up mutually at a loss as to what to do about each other.”

– Wikipedia

English fails for not having a word like this.

Glottochronology refers to methods in historical linguistics used to estimate the time at which languages diverged, based on the assumption that the basic (core) vocabulary of a language changes at a constant average rate. This assumption, originally put forward by Morris Swadesh, is based on an analogy with the use of carbon dating for measuring the age of organic materials, in that a “lexical half-life” is estimated. The method estimates the length of time since two or more languages diverged from a common earlier proto-language, by counting the number of words that have been replaced in each language. This then yields an estimated date of origin for those languages.

- Wikipedia

For example, in an attempt to measure how long Easter Island had been isolated, glottochronologists measured the divergence between the Rapa Nui language (spoken on Easter Island) and the language of the neighboring island of Mangareva and used that difference to estimate the amount of time that must have passed since those two languages had diverged. Neat!