While English has a great many words in it–by some counts a million or more–one of most notable aspects of English has been its willingness to adopt new words that describe something in a way that English does not already convey. The ability to create and adopt words from other languages is one of the ways that English rose in a comparatively short time from an unwritten language of the lower levels of a conquered society to a language capable of expressing the peaks of literature, science, and philosophy. A great deal of the greatness of the English language consists in its ability to freely and without shame appropriate words and concepts from other languages and cultures and to make fertile use of them. While other languages sniff at adopting English words and phrases, afraid of the pollution it will bring to their supposedly pure tongues, English happily takes vocabulary wherever it can be found and spreads it to hundreds of millions of people ready to use that word to describe something that had never been conceived in English quite that way before.

I have a dear Persian friend, and she often refers to me and to other things as being googooli, which is spelled گوگولی in Persian. Repeatedly I asked what this term meant, only to be told that it was untranslatable. Google translate was, perhaps ironically, not very helpful either, merely transliterating the word. So what I did in order to get a sense of the word googooli was to take the Persian spelling of it and to search it online. It might be somewhat dangerous for an English speaker to search unknown terms in unknown languages, but in this case what I found was something adorable. Google images of googooli showed a variety of particularly cute pictures, of adorable kittens, of cute little puppies, and of chubby-cheeked newborn babies. Far from being a difficult concept to understand, it ended up happening to be something I could relate to on a visceral and emotional level. The term captured something I had long felt–from the days of my own early childhood–but which has no verbal equivalent in English.

This interested me enough I pondered it and felt the need to write about it. In Persian, there is a concept for something is not only cute, adorable, and innocent, but also that evokes a very specific set of responses. When we see something that is googooli, it is not only that we recognize something as adorable, unspoiled, innocent, and the like, but also that we respond to it in a very characteristic way. Our response to the googooli is that we want to hold it, be affectionate and tender with it, protect it, and maybe pinch its cheeks gently. To be sure, not everyone has these responses. I have known people who greatly disliked babies and thought them to be useless poop machines, but such people have tended to strike me as coarse, lacking something of their full humanity about them. Our response to that which is innocent and unspoiled, beautiful and adorable in a very specific way, tells us a lot about ourselves. Do we have the instincts to care for and to protect that which is innocent and unspoiled from a word that is often anything but. Do we treasure that which has remained in some way unsullied from the pollution of the world, or do we look down on it and see it as worthy of our sympathy or even exploitation rather than our care and protection.

It is not only beings that can be googooli, but apparently also places. Perhaps a remote but cozy house in the woods, or a precious studio apartment or a tiny house that looks so adorable and small, can be considered to be places that are googooli. They are places that we know of as homey, as places where we feel safe, places that are worthy of our protection and care. We can think that way of a beautiful garden with fresh flowers in bloom, or a small tree like a plum tree or jacaranda tree blossoming. We can see it in the way that people think of their small and isolated valleys or the quiet meadows where they can sit by a creek and ponder on the beauties of creation. Big cities do not evoke this feeling, but one can get it in the moss-covered valleys of Andorra, where the pleasant sheep wander and graze. Baby lambs, for example, are very googooli, and often the places where peaceful and lovely animals live are often googooli places as well, places which evoke not only our sense of awe and innocent pleasure, but also prompt us to be protective of them, to keep them from being destroyed by boring and monotonous housing developments or ugly satanic factories spewing polluting fumes.

How is it that Persian developed, encountered, or maintained a word that has such a specific meaning? Whose appreciation of innocent and unspoiled creation led to the development of such a term? Is it a native Persian term that comes from the lives of herders enjoying the unspoiled creation of Central Asia on their way to the plateaus of Iran? Was it a term that they picked up from others who were there first? Was it the Elamites of Susa who saw the googooli in their travels outside the city and passed on such an appreciation to later Persians, or what? I must admit, I do not know, and without a firm grasp of the origins of the term and its cognates, it is hard to know for sure. To be sure, googooli sounds like the googoo and gaga babytalk that people engage in with newborn babies, but whether that sort of origin can explain the term, its survival and its usefulness are testament to some of the better instincts of humanity to see innocent beauty and desire to care for it, treat it with gentleness and tenderness, and to protect it, for as long as possible, against the ravages of a cruel and corrupting world.