Happy Monday, {{first_name | friend}}! 👋
I hope your week is off to a good start.
Before we get into this email, quick question: have you ever seen a puppy, a baby, or a very round cat and felt an almost violent urge to squeeze it?
Gritted teeth. Clenched fists. "I could just EAT you."
We've all felt it (and confused ourselves in the process). And it turns out, Tagalog has had a word for it all along.
Let's get into it!
Language: Tagalog (Filipino) - "Gigil" (GHEE-gil)
Meaning: Gigil is the trembling, teeth-gritting urge to squeeze or pinch something unbearably cute.
It can also cover the same shaking intensity from frustration — but the adorable version is the famous one.
In English, we might say:
"It's so cute I can't stand it." "I just want to squish him."
Tagalog captures the whole eruption in one word: Gigil.
Why it's fascinating:
English-speaking scientists had to invent a term for this — "cute aggression," coined in a 2015 Yale study and what they found explains gigil perfectly: when the brain's reward system is overwhelmed by cuteness, a flash of aggression appears to balance the circuit and stop us from being incapacitated by a puppy.
Tagalog speakers didn't need the study; the word was already there, in daily use, with a handy adjective form (nakakagigil — "gigil-inducing"). Sometimes a language is just decades ahead of the lab.
Example:
Nakakagigil ang pisngi ng baby!
"The baby's cheeks are squeezably cute!"
N|uu: The Click Language Taught at a Kitchen Table
In South Africa's Northern Cape lives one of the oldest language lineages on Earth: N|uu, the last surviving language of the ǂKhomani San. Its name starts with a click, the "|" is a dental click, the tut-tut sound, and the language uses dozens more.
For most of the 20th century, N|uu was believed extinct. Under apartheid, speakers were mocked and punished for it, and many hid that they knew it at all.
Then, in the 1990s, researchers found a scattering of elderly fluent speakers still living — a discovery linguists compare to finding a living fossil.
One of them, Katrina Esau, decided the language would not leave quietly. Well into her eighties, she ran a small school in her home in Upington, teaching neighbourhood children N|uu words, songs, and greetings at her kitchen table.
"Quarantine" is just the Italian word for "forty days."
During the Black Death, Venice required arriving ships to anchor offshore for quaranta giorni, forty days, before anyone could land. The number was possibly chosen for its biblical resonance as much as its medicine.
The waiting period shrank over the centuries; the word never updated its maths.
Join the Conversation
What triggers your gigil — puppies, babies, or something weirder? Hit reply and tell me — I read every one.
If you're learning English and want to express feelings like this — the strange, specific ones — that's exactly what I built LLH Tutor for. It explains English phrases, idioms, and emotional nuance in terms of your native language, so things actually land. It's free for 2 months right now: tutor.languagelearnershub.com
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