The Meaning of Tingo

There's a wonderful book by Jacot De Boinod The Meaning of Tingo: And Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World.

It's a fabulous collection of strange words that don't have a precise English equivalent but reveal a lot of other cultures' values.
"Fucha" (Portuguese) means "to use company time and resources for one's own purposes", "dhurna" (Anglo-Indian) stands for "extorting payment from someone by sitting at their front door and staying there without food, threatening violence, until you get paid", "sokaiya" (Japanese) means "a man with a few shares in several companies who extorts money by threatening to come to the shareholders' meetings and cause trouble". "Smonta" is Italian for "a theft carried out on a bus or train, from which the perpetrator descends as quickly as possible", "pana po'o" is Hawaiian for "to scratch your head in order to help you to remember something you've forgotten". A person who leaves without paying the bill is a "Zechpreller", and that's German - I wonder in what way THIS is typical for the German speaking countries...

And "tingo" from the book's title is from the Pascuense language (Easter Island) and means "borrowing things from a friend's house, one by one, until he has nothing left". I like this very much.