Courtesy of Ross Perlin at the New Inquiry: "As the intellectual historian Svetlana Boym reminds us: “Curiously, intellectuals and poets from different national traditions began to claim that they had a special word for homesickness that was radically untranslatable: the Portuguese had their saudade, Russians toska, Czechs litost’, Romanians dor ... untranslatable words of national uniqueness [that] proved to be synonyms of the same historical emotion.” One word, coined by the psychologist Erik Erikson, that does not appear in the Dictionary: pseudo-speciation, the purposeful elaboration of difference where none really existed before.
