the one about 'thing' and paltry translations

Even if it sounds vague, context can carry more weight than the words themselves.

There’s an obvious difference between oral and written communication. However, where I find myself being as specific as I can in written format, I often say “thing” when speaking about items near me.

Does that make me a lazy communicator, as both my ex and current partner jokingly point out? Maybe. But the more I thought about where it all stems from, I realized that it’s a pretty common way of communicating back home. On the island, we use context clues and circumstantial awareness to deduce what anyone is talking about when we say “cosa” (thing) or "chucho” (typically an electronic).

There is a nuance lost when I can only say “thing” in English, where in Spanish I have cosa (female), coso (male), cosita (small thing), cosota (big thing), and that helps inform the recipient of what I’m referring to in a given situation. In English, the word “thing” would have to be preceded by an adjective.

This translation conundrum wasn’t something that I really thought about until it was pointed out to me when I was communicating in English. Nevertheless, this deficiency provides a unique opportunity to those who speak more than one language to see how we can innovate in how we communicate by playing around with the one that does not allow for intricacies such as context.

A reasonable facsimile would be to adjust how we use some words—something that younger generations are most adept at doing—and, as professional communicators/journalists/writers, not looking down on that practice. For example, words like “gyat,” “delulu,” and “bruh” are new iterations of older words that present a distinct connotation, even if they have the same denotation as their predecessors. That is all to say, that we should embrace creativity in the written world as we do in the oral. I’m still unsure of how to do that myself, but it’s fun to think about the possibilities when the opportunity presents itself.