LingoCards Blog — "10 Untranslatable Indonesian Words You Need to Know!"
- Author: unattributed (LingoCards, a trilingual language-learning app's company blog)
- Publication: LingoCards blog
- Date: undated (accessed 2026-09-05); URL slug and content suggest a language-learning-marketing post of the kind this project has repeatedly dated by other means when undated
- URL: https://lingo-apps.com/untranslatable-indonesian-words/
- Type: secondary/popular (commercial language-learning company content marketing); credulous stance, typical of the listicle genre already tracked for other words (cf. the Beelinguapp gigil source)
- Accessed: 2026-09-05
Extract
- A representative instance of the popular "untranslatable words" listicle genre applied to Indonesian, framing its ten entries as words that "don't have equivalent in English" and positioning them as "unique Indonesian terms" requiring explanation for English speakers — the genre's standard rhetorical move, already documented on the popular-phenomenon topic page.
- Lists gemas/gemes first among its ten words, glossed: "a term to describe the feeling when we see someone/something adorable until we want to pinch, squeeze, hug, or even bite them" — the specific cute-aggression elaboration, matching Wiktionary's second sense and the psychological-literature framing rather than KBBI's plainer "fondness mixed with irritation" gloss.
- Does not separately list geram — the listicle picks the native-rooted near-synonym, not the Persian-loanword one, as Indonesian's representative "untranslatable" cute-aggression word.
- The other nine words listed (masuk angin, kerokan, jambret, ga enak, cuci mata, jayus, kan, latah, anjir) are unrelated to the cute-aggression/anger semantic domain and not otherwise used by this project this session.
Gaps
- A commercial company blog, not independently fact-checked; treated as evidence of popular framing/genealogy, not linguistic authority.
- Undated; no author name given, limiting genealogy precision (contrast dated listicle sources elsewhere on file).
- A second, independent Indonesian-word listicle (IndonesianPod101, 2019) was checked directly this session and found to not include gemas or geram at all — the word's presence in the popular genre is confirmed by at least one real instance, but not shown to be as universal/canonical within the genre as e.g. hygge or saudade.