As our language ceases to dominate cyberspace (our share of the Web has fallen to about 27%), we English speakers are hesitantly stepping out of our monolingual sphere and evincing renewed interest in foreign tongues. Language learning websites like Livemocha and Matador Network seem to crop up like mushrooms, Rosetta Stone is a publicly traded company whose stock is up 41% year to date, and last year’s top-rated YouTube video — remember? —was in Korean (with a few repetitions of “hey sexy lady” thrown in for nostalgia’s sake).

Part of the allure of learning a new language is discovering words for things you wouldn’t have known existed or thought of in the same way before. When I lived in Paris, I learned that a vinaigrette is something very different from the “salad dressing” I grew up with (and not something you’d ever buy in a bottle at the supermarket, despite the now-ubiquitous availability of a product masquerading under that name on our supermarket shelves). The perpetual fascination of attempting to translate between two languages lies in the gap that always exists, even between very closely related words. The Spanish olvido describes something we don’t quite have a word for: not an act of forgetting or moment of forgetfulness or total oblivion, but a mental compartment that sits opposite memory, just as blindness is the opposite of sight. You can’t hold or put something in your forgetting in English, but in Spanish you can tener or poner algo en olvido.

See: Publishers Weekly