A few years ago, an incident occurred that made me really curious about the way we use our words in everyday life. I was sitting in class and my friend Amanda—who's also an author—comes up to me and asks for my help. I'm gonna ask you the same question she asked me:

"You know that sound that bare feet make on tile flooring, like it's not quite wet, but the tile sort of sticks to your feet? What onomatopoeia would you use to describe that?"

[leave some silence]

So this is pretty specific—and you might find it hard to think of one.

But for me, in that moment when Amanda asked me, I had an answer right away.

“Peta peta, peta peta.”

And let me guess, you've probably never heard that before. That's because it's Japanese. To me, as a Japanese-Canadian, I knew exactly what sound Amanda was talking about and peta peta fits perfectly. But no matter how many google searches we made, we couldn't find an english onomatopoeia that perfectly described this sound....

[play bare feet sound]

In that moment I thought well, why not?

This is "shiiiin—the sound of silence" and it's a podcast by me, Luna Kawano, that'll take you into the surprisingly complex world of onomatopoeias, how it differs across languages, and why it might matter for you to know all of this.

[Music to Classroom ambience]

If you went through an english education system, you're probably familiar with onomatopoeias, and know them as words that imitate or depict sounds.

[pig sounds]