No Word for It

by rjs
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Published on: June 6, 2011

No Word for It

Nasruddin was a language tutor — for that was one of the many things he did for work — so once he had a young student whose parents brought him for private instruction in Kurdish. Though Nasruddin himself knew only a few words of Kurdish, he thought he could fake teaching the language to the child, who likely wouldn’t know any better, in any case.
“First, let’s start with the word for ‘hot soup’,” Nasruddin tutored. “In Kurdish, this is aash.”
“Sir,” the student asked, “pray tell, what is the word for ‘cold soup’?”
“There is no word for ‘cold soup’ — you see, the Kurds only eat their soup hot.”

Excerpted from The Uncommon Sense of the Immortal Mullah Nasruddin: Stories, Jests, and Donkey Tales of the Beloved Persian Folk Hero

Your Daily Nasruddin

This jest is popular among the collections available; whether because it demonstrates Nasruddin’s eloquence in ignorance, or because it is some sort of ethnic joke, is uncertain. One wonders also why Nasruddin didn’t just make up the word for “cold soup.”

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