wabi

Hello and welcome to Word of the Week! I’m your host, Liz. This podcast is dedicated to words and phrases that are untranslatable into English. Let’s discover the nuance of the world’s languages, shall we? 

This week’s word is wabi, a Japanese word meaning ‘a flawed detail that creates an elegant whole’. This word may not be new to some of you. If you’ve ever seen a great Japanese cultural treasure, perhaps a teacup made by an old tea-master, you may have recognized the wabi that distinguished it from a teacup that was cheaply or factory made. 

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but that eye is a culturally conditioned one. Everything a person’s family, language, and society says explicitly and in many tacit ways about what beauty is or isn’t is the perspective the beholder’s eye brings. Currently, society might see beauty as symmetrical, sleek or smooth. A skyscraper or sports car is one prized type of beauty. 

Another would be a simple, roughly fashioned, or plainly colored pot, which might very well have a crack in it. This crack would be an element of the pot’s wabi: a distinctive and aesthetic flaw that exhibits the spirit of the moment in which this object was created from all other moments in eternity. 

To say that English doesn’t have a word for wabi, isn’t to say we can’t understand its meaning, or that we’re incapable of appreciating this kind of beauty. And perhaps one takeaway from this word, is that beauty is a learnable cultural belief system. Humans can be trained to recognize beauty where they used to see only flaws. Learning to see the wabi in everyday objects (broken-in shoes or well-seasoned iron skillet) is an enriching exercise, no? Everyday life can be art. 

Here’s to this week… May you all endeavor to adopt this Word of the Week and see the world a little bit differently. I’ll be back next week with a new word. Thank you for listening!