safewords
Good morning!
I hope you're dealing well with the heat in Hungary!
@LaReinaSofia and I were discussing safewords a few days ago. We've never played and it's unlikely we ever will, but we have our safeword now. It's as personal as you'd like for your collection.
It's ‘dusaristotókeia’ (with a rising tone at the ó). It's a word that appears just once in Homer's Iliad and means something utterly untranslatable like ‘unhappy mother of the noblest son’.
The background: Sofia and I were walking around Athens when we first met, discussing languages and how compact Ancient Greek could get. She used this one as an example. I never forgot it, and she remembered it two — 12 years later.