8 Useful Foreign Words the English Language Needs to Steal

To sing along in nonsensical noises that vaguely resemble the lyrics of a song.

When we tell you that the French have a colloquial verb that literally means "to yogurt," odds are your imagination will instantaneously jump to one particular image. We know what you're picturing. It's not that. Hell, you couldn't possibly be more wrong -- it's not breakfast-related at all.

According to Lucy Wadham, a British novelist who lived in France for nearly a quarter century and wrote a nonfiction book in an attempt to decode Frenchness for her fellow Brits, the French are obsessed with English-language music. So much so that they feel an uncontrollable urge to sing along with it, even if they not only don't know the lyrics, but totally don't know the language that they're singing in. This peculiar pastime is known as "yogurting," and it can send music through such absurd transformations as turning Queen's "I Want to Break Free" into "I Want a Steak Frites." Conversely, it can actually transmogrify "Smells Like Teen Spirit" into the deep social commentary that people always thought it was.

It makes sense that a nation where most music is imported would have a name for such a phenomenon, but the term could come in handy anywhere. Hell, we all spent a year singing along to "Gangnam Style" -- to a fluent Korean speaker, it must have sounded like we were all having some kind of seizure. And while we could refer to this as "Whoppa Gangnam Style Syndrome," it's not like we know the words to English songs, either. When you try to rap T.I.'s verse in "Blurred Lines," would you ever have figured out the line "In a hundred years not dare would I/Pull a Pharcyde let you pass me by" without Googling it?

No, you just yaourt that shit.

What It Means:

A person who corners you to tell you long, meaningless stories, usually about his oh-so-miserable life.

Sometimes life is sad. We get it. If, for example, your beloved dog had to be put down because it contracted rabies and literally ripped the town sheriff a new asshole, it's completely understandable that you're feeling down, and nobody will accuse you of being a killjoy when you tell them about it. But then, well, there's that one guy. You know him: He's the one who shows up at every social event with the specific agenda of boring and depressing the absolute shit out of any- and everybody by perpetually babbling on about the unbroken chain of catastrophes that is his life.

That cute waitress from your local cafe didn't respond to this guy's texts? He'll make a five-hour Shakespearean play out of it, and you'll be his sole audience. Did it rain this afternoon, and he was planning a round of golf? For you, that's a minor inconvenience; for him, it's a reason to describe every single bad thing that's ever happened to him during his crestfallen clusterfuck of a life in details so colorful, they'd make James Joyce chub up.

In America, we'd probably call this guy an asshole and leave it at that, but that wouldn't exactly serve as fair warning to others in regard to just what they're in for should they ever encounter him. In Italy, though, they make it quite clear with one simple word -- this guy is an attaccabottoni. It doesn't matter if the amount of fucks you have to give add up to precisely zero -- an attaccabottoni is telling you all about that shit anyway. And because his tale is so tragic, you look like the asshole for trying to get away.

In Holland, this is called "epibreren." Unlike most of the words on this list, "epibreren" is complete nonsense. Originally made up by a Dutch civil servant to get people to leave his line faster, it's designed to sound really opulent and complicated so that others will assume you're working on something they don't understand and simply leave you alone. In Dutch, words ending in "-eren" tend to be related to fancy things requiring lots of brain learnin' to understand, and since people generally don't like to admit that they haven't the slightest idea what the hell you're talking about, chances are they'll just shrug and assume your work is far too important for the likes of them to grasp.

Of course, we're not sure how well it works now that everyone's in on the joke, but that's why it's perfect to import to the USA. "I'd totally help you out, but I've got a whole day of coding epibreren ahead of me."

What It Means:

Weather that looks great until you actually step out in it. Specifically, a beautiful sunny but frigid day.

You wake up and look out the window at a splendidly sunny day, so you forgo the jacket and gleefully stroll out the front door like a character in the opening credits of an '80s sitcom, only to have Mother Nature bite you straight in the left ass cheek with her prickly fangs, which in this case are also icicles. We didn't pull that toothy image out of thin air, by the way. The phrase "soare cu dinti" originates in the homeland of Pimp Dracula himself, Romania, and literally translates to "sun with teeth."

And apparently Mother Nature just can't get enough of pulling this "psych!" on the Romanian folk, judging by the fact that the term appears in their weather forecasts again and again and again and again. If that doesn't convince you of the phenomenon's ubiquitousness, it's also the name of a Romanian pop song by a band called Robin and the Backstabbers, which is featured in an uber appropriate music video consisting of a full three minutes of what appears to be one of the band members taking video of the snowy (yet sunny!) Romanian countryside through a car window:

If that's their answer to "Walking on Sunshine," color us unsurprised that Romanians are so obsessed with how much everything bites.

And speaking of helpful seasonal slang ...

In trying to decipher the possible origin of such a term, our imagination conjures images of countless Norwegians bundled up in thick animal hides to fend off the icy effects of a winter straight out of Game of Thrones, endlessly polishing their horned helmets with lutefisk oil and vigorously air guitaring/moshing to death metal in a feeble attempt to fend off the merciless, omnipresent cold (and that exhausts all of our Norwegian stereotypes, thank you). In a culture like that, it's no wonder that utepils would be regarded as an almost sacred icon.

Of course, according to Google Translate, "utepils" simply translates to "outdoor beer." So, you know, it's probably that.

Yeah, that didn't work out so well for you, did it? But apparently you just need to step up your gift-giving prowess and do a bit more planning, because in Germany they have a term for averting your spouse's fury by way of a wee bit of good old-fashioned bribery: "drachenfutter." The situation is seemingly so common in Germany that, on Saturday night (or Biernacht, as it's known in German), scores of soon-to-be-plastered guys show up at bars with wrapped gifts tucked under their arms to be used as peace offerings should they actually manage to stumble into the right house at the end of the night. And if they don't, well ... mugger deterrent, we guess?

If you happen to be some type of linguistic savant, you've probably already figured out that the term literally translates to "dragon fodder." We're not sure if the "dragon" is in reference to the wife herself or is more figuratively referring to her wrath, or for that matter whether the "fodder" is in reference to actual food (the term is sometimes said to specifically refer to chocolates) or to what the husband's dick is going to end up as if he doesn't have something real nice in his hand when he shows up looking like Pig-Pen from Peanuts (except surrounded by a cloud of alcohol vapor instead of filth).

You, dear friend, have just tartled all over yourself. And apparently the Scottish know this feeling better than anyone, because they've coined a one-word term for it (we have to assume this is somehow related to the fact that they also have a variety of whiskey named after them).

To wrap things up with a continuation of our theme of partying and alcohol, here's a little word-association trick for you: Imagine you're throwing a soiree at your place, when Sean Connery unexpectedly shows up. He saunters up to you as only a former 007 can saunter, glances toward his date, and then says, in his big-ass Scottish brogue, "Pardon my tartle." Now, imagine you misunderstood him and he's actually apologizing because his date is an anthropomorphic shelled reptile who just dropped a long, slow deuce on your brand-new carpet.

You may still forget people's names left and right, but we can now guarantee that "tartle" is one word you'll never forget.

Related Reading: Did you know there's a Japanese word for a beautiful girl, if only viewed from behind. There's also a German word for the excess weight from emotional overeating. Prefer filthy foreign phrases? We've got those too.