>>>Well, Peter Pedantic, I would have said "holiday" but, to Americans, that seems to mean public time off, such as Xmas and Thanksgiving. Vacs is used mainly by British university students to mean the periods between their terms (semesters).
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>>No, it's not pedantic, it's just that English language doesn't have enough words, Q.E.D., though it wasn't my intent :).
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>>Homo homini homonym.
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>Well FYI in the UK we call a vacuum cleaner, generically, a "hoover" (after the manufacturer), we call a ball-point pen a "Biro", sticky tape "Sellotape" (US - "Scotchtape"), public holidays - "bank holidays", a period away from work - "holiday" and "vacation" usually refers to ones ending the habitation of a dwelling, as in its now becoming "vacant".
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>How can youy say that English doesn't have enough words? - it's got words coming out of its backside!

If it had enough words, it wouldn't have to reuse them so much. There's no word for "doček" - should be something between "end of waiting for" and "reception", but only as an event, not the stall in a hotel. There are no separate words for "sell" as active and "sell" as passive: if a book sells, what does it sell?

Or, why is there no word for the wooden part of the rifle, so it uses the financial instrument instead?

How many legs do your dbfs have? They are tables, right?

What are your bedsheets called if they are made of cotton? Still linen?

The verb forms are particularly sparse - but I wrote about that already.

Why is there only one word for "what" and "what" (the first one to ask for a definition, the second to ask for an attribute)? I.e. there's no inquisitive pronoun that unambiguously leads to this or that type of answer. To "what bridge is that?" you may equally answer "Golden gate" and "a hanging one". Likewise, I never know how to answer riddles like "what is a ..." - with an equivalent term, or with an adjective.

I do note that English is richer than my language in some areas - you have words for about a dozen different kinds of glasses, except that "glass" can mean material, vessel and spectacles - in this case I mean the second, and in the case of "spectacles" I don't mean "spectacular events". Or, it distinguishes leather from skin, toads from frogs - we don't. But then it doesn't have female and male forms of names for most of the animals (except cow/bull and few more); not to mention the neutral form for the *lings. We do have quite a set of suffixes for each.

That's what I meant about "pressing charges" last time... which I won't do now, one never knows whether there are leftover bullets inside, and the iron (which, ironically, I don't take as an element here, but as a pressing iron - another thing without a name, only a description) may cause them to explode.

Etc etc...