“fish don’t even know theyre wet” and? you don’t even know youre luft (air equivalent of wet)
This is a really good example of how we can just make up words that work. “Luft” is a perfect word for this it feels correct and we understand and can feel it.
Like it would’ve necessarily work with other words but “luft” is a combination of sounds that means luft (air equivalent of wet).
Thank you but the reason it works is because it is a deliberately chosen word!
The closest word we have in English for ‘wet but with air’ would be ‘aerated’, which is the past principle of the verb ‘aerate’. As a multi syllable Latin derived word, aerated wouldn’t feel equivalent to wet even if you just used it as an adjective in a sentence- so to have something that feels like ‘wet’ I looked for a monosyllabic air-related word with a German root.
As many have pointed out in the notes, ‘Luft’ means air in a lot of languages, because it comes from the proto-Germanic word ‘luftuz’. It’s also used in English as a chess term, and is a doublet of ‘loft’. Because it’s rare in conversational English but has the right etymology to evoke the idea of air and the texture of ‘wet’, it is very easily appropriated for the concept of ‘air equivalent of wet’.
