Last year, the internet content aggregation machine spat out an interesting article about emotion words in foreign languages that have no parallel in English. Words like "duende", Spanish for the property of a work of art that powerfully moves a person. (The least obnoxious of these is from the OED.)

Also last year, I recommended [a:Connie Willis|14032|Connie Willis|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1199238234p2/14032.jpg]'s [b:To Say Nothing of the Dog|77773|To Say Nothing of the Dog (Oxford Time Travel, #2)|Connie Willis|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1436397341s/77773.jpg|696] to a friend. When she read it, she loved it: ranted and raved about how good it was via IM, e-mail, facebook messages, Goodreads, a phone conversation(!). She stayed up until some ungodly hour reading it 2-3 nights in a row, basically a textbook home run. And I felt really, really good about that. Pleased to have shared this book that I loved, and allowed one of my friends to love it too.

I bring these two facts together to express a complaint: there's no word in any language for the positive feeling you get from somebody loving one of your cultural recommendations. And it is with this in mind that I give you the new word I've been trying out for it: "Maslania". Because of Orphan Black -- everybody I've ever recommended it to has either watched it and loved it, or already watched it and had been thinking of recommending it to me.

At this point, you're asking what the point of all this incoherent jibbering is. I read [b:The Cuckoo's Calling|16160797|The Cuckoo's Calling (Cormoran Strike, #1)|Robert Galbraith|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1358716559s/16160797.jpg|22002305] on a Hawaiian vacation. I spent the entire day at the pool. I was with three people:

1. My beloved wife
2. Our server Sarah, who brought us...let's call it "several" Mai Tais
3. Cormoran Strike

And it was a pretty good day, I tell you what.

The real thing about it that sticks with me is that Rowling is just so damned good at writing about people caring about other people. Everything else she does -- character creation, setting, plot -- is done with professional, practiced skill. But she brings down the hammer when it comes to showing friends being friends.

"[W]hat did she see in Evan Duffield? I’ll tell you,” he said, without pausing for an answer. “It’s that wounded-poet crap, that soul-pain shit, that too-much-of-a-tortured-genius-to-wash bollocks. Brush your teeth, you little bastard. You’re not fucking Byron.”