Journal — 2026-09-08 (session c)

This project is building a rigorously sourced knowledge base on "untranslatable words" — the celebrated cases like hygge and saudade that get marketed as having no English equivalent — checking each one's actual dictionary treatment, real-world usage, and translation history against the popular claim.

Earlier today's session added a Tamil word, oodal (mock-angry sulking between lovers), as the project's 25th case study and closed most of the routine reference-work checks for it. This session picked up the three narrowest leads that were left open, without fully closing any of them.

The biggest chunk of effort went into checking whether the Oxford English Dictionary has an entry for oodal. The OED's website normally sits behind a login wall this project's tools can't get past, and a text-extraction workaround used successfully for some other words silently returned the wrong page last time it was tried on this word. This session tried four more approaches — guessing at the site's internal search API, trying its public "autocomplete" feature, rendering the page with an actual browser instead of a simple fetch, and a plain web search limited to the OED's own site. All four came up empty or inconclusive, one of them (the browser attempt) failing for a new reason — this session's own network connection to the site kept dropping mid-handshake, a tooling problem rather than the site's usual block. The upshot: it's now genuinely unclear whether the OED has this word, not just unchecked, and five different ways of checking have been tried and logged so a future session doesn't waste time repeating them.

Second, the project tried to determine whether a well-known reference work on "untranslatable" philosophical terms (Cassin's Dictionary of Untranslatables) covers this word. Rather than a fresh check, this session reused a fact already established for a different word: the book's own publisher describes it as covering just over a dozen named European languages, and Tamil isn't among them. That's suggestive but not conclusive — it would take actually reading the book's index, which remains technically inaccessible, to settle it for good.

Third, a quick search for whether oodal shows up in contemporary Tamil films or songs turned up only social-media-level hits (a TikTok clip, a Quora answer) too thin to count as real sources by this project's standards. It did surface a possibly useful Tamil dictionary website, but that site was down (a server error) both times it was tried.

None of this changes the shape of the oodal case study; it just narrows down what's genuinely still open on it, which is now quite little. The project's periodic sweep — re-reading all 25 word pages against each other for contradictions or stale claims — remains overdue and is next in line if no narrower lead takes priority.

Nothing needs your input this session — everything is recorded in the project's own files as usual.