Source — Katexic Clippings (archived), "litost"
- Title: litost
- Publication: Katexic Clippings (word-of-the-day site, archived)
- URL: https://katexic.com/word/litost/
- Accessed: 2026-09-03
- Type: tertiary (popular word-curiosity site), credulous toward the "untranslatable" framing — a close relative of this project's other listicle/word-of-the-day sources (contrast the peer-reviewed
margala-2010-transcultural-kundera-and-the-joke.md).
Extract
Restates Kundera's core definition and his own description of the word's sound ("the first syllable... sounds like the wail of an abandoned dog"). Adds one item not found elsewhere in this project's research: a comparison by poet Shane Book, likening litost's untranslatable specificity to something as precise and non-verbal as "a specific shade of green on grass" — offered as a literary-world example of the word's afterlife as a byword for untranslatability itself, independent of Kundera's own novel.
Gaps
- No citation given for the Shane Book comparison beyond the site's own text (no interview, essay, or poem named) — flagged as unconfirmed provenance, not independently traced by this project.