*Insert Lacuna

fakescience:

So, in literary context, a lacuna is the simplest term for a lexical gap. Don’t go looking that up on Google images, bad things happen. Lexical gaps are a little weird. When one language has a word for something that another language doesn’t, even though they mean the same thing. It’s pretty much untranslatability. (Thumbs up for new words!) One example in the English language is the grammatical-error-prone ‘you’. The fogginess of the singular word ‘you’ and the fact that we have no one plural word for it, leads to words like ‘ya’ll’. The other side of the argument is that most other languages do, in fact, have a word for this. In Spanish, one would say ‘Ustedes’ or even ‘Vosotros’ in a more relaxed environment. People would often say “Well that’s not a word, points off this essay even though I’m a history teacher and have no right to be deeply critiquing your grammar.”  But really, what else do you do? If you were to say ‘You all’ that’s grammatically correct. Aren’t you really just contracting it? Wasn’t that how most contractions came about, at some point? Maybe not, but I like a bit of irony. You’s have a good one.