Hunglish.orgIn his continuing quest to understand the strange and exotic language Hungarian, resident expat Scott Savoie happens upon a word he quite likes: "Sitt," roughly meaning "useless stuff that results from refurbishing a flat."
written by Scott Savoie
One of the difficulties of learning Hungarian is that there are some few common words.
When there are words in common in Hungarian and in English they rarely mean the same thing. Linguists call these „false friends” and Hungarian and English have a few. For example „most” is one word both languages possess, only in Hungarian it means „now” and in English, it means „legtöbb.”
„Sitt” (pronounced „shit,” but with a longer I and a harder T) is a Hungarian word that means „useless stuff that results from refurbishing a flat.” This is the old tiles and wallpaper that has been stripped off and needs to be hauled away. You could say something like, „After he started to fix the apartment up, he had two whole containers full of sitt.”
In this meaning of the word, „useless stuff” is similar to the way the word „shit” is used in English when not refering to excrement. The rest of the time the word translates to something like „francba,” a relatively mild Hungarian curseword expressing disappointment.
It is too bad this word „sitt” doesn’t come up in conversation too often – I really do like the sound of it.