Mokita

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 mokita. This is a Kiriwina word that means ‘a truth everybody knows but nobody speaks’. Kiriwina is just one of the many languages existing on New Guinea. If you’re at all interested in how languages develop, get thee to the Wikipedia pages for New Guinea. It’s a treasure trove!

In many kinds of social encounters, there’s a large amount of words that are not voiced. And they can be more important than the ones that are spoken aloud. Your neighbor may have back-fence gossip for you, but what the neighbor isn’t saying about a particular person is just as telling as what they are saying. And when you speak the same language as someone, or share a kinship or cultural heritage, there are special agreements on what words symbolize. 

Within a family, alcoholism may be an ever-present unspoken truth. This is a harder truth to speak to. On the more amusing flip side, the unwritten rules of many games can govern the conduct of its players. Is it a rule to play Uno on a timer? No, but if that’s how some siblings play out their competitive family dynamics, then so be it. 

In the West, we have the folktale of the emperor’s new clothes. This tale reveals that we do know exactly what the power of unspoken truths can lead to. But English just doesn’t have a word for it like the Kiriwina do. And yet, even the word mokita is a way to directly address something that is indirectly in the room, between people, hanging in the air. 

Indirect speech is a high art in cultures like the Kiriwina. We get the word ‘taboo’ from Melanesian cultures as well, which implies that taboo is addressed indirectly. But directly! A paradox of language as social construct.

Mokita helps shield folks from truths too hard to look at head on, but it’s also an act of kindness to recognize the truth unspoken. Maybe your buddy has a child who looks exactly like you, well then the whole issue is better left mokita. Ok there, milkman? Because speaking about mokita can also mean you’re obligated to do something about it. So while you might want to get down to the mokita of Uncle Joe having his ninth beer before noon, through an intervention, you might not wish to call out a mokita that might precipitate further family drama. 

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!