Joel complains that there are some concepts that you just can't translate from one language to another.
In his post he talks about three concepts:

• Davka - which translate to "in spite of" or "because" in most normal uses, but it doesn't gives you the true meaning of the word because unless you speak Hebrew, (and more than that, unless you live in Israel for quite a bit of time) you wouldn't understand what this mean. Most often, you see people do actions that make no sense, when you ask them why, they answer "Davka" and that sort of explains it.
• Rosh Gadol / Rosh Katan - Big Head / Small Head, respectively. Those are terms that are taken straight from military service {where most people encounter them for the first time}.
  Rosh Gadol is to think outside the box, to understand what is going on and respond to what is happening, to forsee needs and solve them before they become problem, taking risks.
  Rosh Katan is the reverse, doing just what you're told, working by the rules and not doing anything more than you were told to do.

Trying to answer Joel's challange¹:

No matter how debunked Whorf is, I'm still convinced that Israelis are more likely to do things in spite of all common sense, simply because they have a word for it - davka. And I have been forced to write entire essays simply because I cannot find any other way to convey to English speakers the difference between thinking beyond your assigned duties and roles and following the rules blindly. All I wanted to say was that methodologies encourage following the rules and I need everyone on my team to be able to think beyond the rules, and see where the problems are, and how to solve them.

To someone who has never learned Hebrew it takes me two or three books to explain that. MSF is a fraud–an attempt to consolidate all the extra things Microsoft programmers do in a set of rules which are supposed to work if you force small minded developers to implement them. And it’s never going to work.

¹I won't win the prize, for the simple reason that I don't think that this is a correct translation, there is too much cultural baggage in those terms that can't be easily expressed.