ta

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 ta. A Chinese word meaning ‘to understand things and thus take them lightly’. Westerners do not have a monopoly on the ethic of “work hard, get ahead, leave the rest to the politicians”. Not by a long shot. All the world’s major religions have a parable about the pitfalls of mistaking the price of something as its value. Moral blinders and ambition is a pancultural trait.

The Chinese language has this word, ta, as a kind of understanding of the situation that enables them to take it lightly. And it’s a difficult word to even begin to translate or explain. Because it’s not a harmful word. This isn’t a word imbued with greed or denial, even though disengaging and taking things lightly could be perceived as such. 

You can ta office politics, for example, or a difficult mental or physical task. You can ta “the human heart” or “the ways of the world”. The longer word takuan means “to have seen through life”, which is a state of mind that enables humans to put up with temporary disadvantages or obscurity. Especially living in a world of unfettered ambition. In this sense, it’s the way that you cope and still achieve, still thrive on your terms. 

Takuan is an understanding that the world works in strange and sometimes unfair ways, even an understanding that all things cannot be understood. Perhaps in our modern world, you could imagine someone at work saying, ‘I had a hard time dealing with the fact that the overbearing deskmate got promoted - until I got some ta about it.” And perhaps you’ll take it as a compliment to hear that “he/she/they has great ta”: a compliment to bestow on someone who is savvy and sympathetic. 

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!