Listeners to Today last week were fascinated by an item about foreign words with no equivalent in English that must be translated by a whole sentence. If brunch is an example of a portmanteau word, these are, I think, examples of holdall words, packed full of meaning. Merriam-Webster, the dictionary people, had asked for examples and hundreds came in.

One mentioned last week by Susie Dent, for 30 years the denizen of Dictionary Corner on Countdown, was ranço, from Brazilian Portuguese, with the apparent meaning ‘an irrational dislike of someone innocuous’. But, Brazilian or not, ranço means ‘rancidity’. It comes from Latin rancidus, which already meant ‘offensive’ in addition to the literally rancid. From the Latin rancor, ‘rancidity’, English derives rancour.

When Susie Dent had been in Dictionary Corner for only two years, Harold Bloom wrote: ‘In Iago and Edmund, as in Hedda, there is a playfulness gone rancid, and insofar as the sublime Falstaff yields to a certain rancidity, a trollishness appears in him also.’

He did not mean by trollishness the online misbehaviour; troll in the new sense is first cited from 1992 by the OED as ‘a person who posts deliberately erroneous or antagonistic messages to a newsgroup or similar forum with the intention of eliciting a hostile response’. It originated from the act of trolling in angling.

Anyway, Mishal Husain, the Today presenter, suggested last week that jungly, an Urdu word, is very evocative of ‘a person with no manners who behaves badly’. It is, though I fear I might get into trouble if I applied it to anyone from the Indian subcontinent. Ms Husain took herself to task a few years ago for unthinkingly referring to the migrant camp at Calais as ‘the Jungle’, but then reading an article by Joseph Harker in the Guardian in 2016 that called the name dehumanising. ‘What kind of people live in a jungle? Are they civilised?’ he asked. Certainly we should not treat them with ranço.