The world means "inbetween" and gets extrapolated to a lot of deeper meanings and be more specific or specialized depending on the context.

It's like bokeh, the world in itself has a base meaning, which can point to a specific thing when used in the right context, like in photography.

part of the fetishization of Japanese culture

It reminds me of Prince, who was talking to a fellow musician and told them that the space between the notes is just as funky as the notes you play.

Debussy said it first lol

English culture can also express 'negative space' or 'the space between'. You just did.

Four syllables and two or three words versus a single phoneme or kanji tells you something about relative priorities, though...

If a culture has a word for cat which is "owl face bat ear dog" or something, sure it's got cats, but we can intuit that they're a less central concept to that culture than bats, owls or dogs.

Having a word for it vs being able to describe it. I'd argue the first suggests greater importance.

The main difference regards the emphasis/value placed on it. In Japanese culture the space between:

> often (holds) as much importance as the rest of an artwork

This is a great read, with examples (namely gardens and theaters):

https://web.archive.org/web/20241127041031/https://deeperjap...

> Having a word for it vs being able to describe it. I'd argue the first suggests greater importance.

That's not universal though. Some languages like Japanese, German, & Inuit are synthetic, so a "word" may be more like a compound phrase in an analytic language. So "having a word for it" can be identical to "being able to describe it". In this case it's a particularly short word, so your point is otherwise valid. I'd say that it's probably more "low Kolmogorov complexity vs high Kolmogorov complexity" of the word or phrase that matters. Concepts expressable with lower-complexity words or phrases are likely more common & thus more culturally important than those requiring high-complexity words or phrases.