Overheard^* in the Linguistics Student Lounge

Chesterton “T͡ʃazː” Wilburfors Gilchrist, IV
Grad Student Union Steward, United Linguistics Workers^**
Fifth-Year Grad Student, Dept. of Lexicology and Glottometrics
Devonshire-upon-Glencullen University, Southampton

All names have been changed to protect the guilty innocent.

Preterite: I have just elicited, from a native speaker, the fact that there is no Spanish word for “rhubarb”.

Etymologically: So what do actors in crowd scenes repeat in Spanish movies and TV shows then?

Transitively: Just because a native speaker doesn’t know a word doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Native speakers are unreliable, if they even exist.
It seems that rhubarb is like chocolate, coffee, and bikini in that the word is cognate/borrowed in most major world languages. My theory is that for chocolate, coffee, and bikinis, the items spread because they were very popular and the word traveled with the items. In the case of rhubarb, I think it worked differently—the word is the same in almost every language because you have to call it something, even if you don’t want to have anything to do with it—so you might as well just borrow the word.
My horse-shoe popularity theory has a weak spot—mango—which seems to be neither very popular nor very unpopular, despite obviously tasting terrible. Perhaps the right metric is not median popularity but maximum popularity within a reasonably-sized sub-population, however gustatorily degenerate they might be.

Keysmith: Transitively is working on a new linguistic theory, gustatorily degenerative grammar (GDG). Please do not heckle until he’s got a couple of publications out of it.
Mango, of course, spreads under entirely different socioeconomic conditions than do chocolate, coffee, and bikini—to wit, the mango is perishable, while the others all have a longer shelf-life (roughly equivalent to one fashion cycle). Mangoes ought to be more similar to other rapidly perishable items, such as iPhones.

Jargonisation: Untranslatable words only exist if you suck at translation.

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