About the Book
Do you ever search in vain for exactly the right word? Perhaps you want to articulate the vague desire to be far away? Or you can’t quite convey that odd urge to go outside and check to see if anyone is coming? Maybe you’re struggling to say there’s just the right amount of something – not too much, but not too little? While the English may not have a word for it, the good news is that the Greeks, the Norwegians, the Dutch or possibly the Inuit probably do.
Whether it’s mafan (a Mandarin word for when you just can’t be bothered) or the Indonesian jayus (a joke so poorly told and so unfunny that you can’t help but laugh), this delightful smorgasbord of wonderful words from around the world will come to your rescue when the English language fails. Part glossary, part amusing musings, but wholly enlightening and entertaining, The Greeks Had a Word For It means you’ll never again be lost for just the right word.
Dedication
For Sam, Abi and Rebecca,
and Lucy, Sophie and Tom
Foreword
Words are among the most important things in our lives – somewhere just behind air, water and food. For a start, they’re the way we pass on our thoughts from one to another and from generation to generation. Without words, it’s hard to see how mankind could ever have evolved from ape-like creatures grunting at the entrance to a cave and wondering where they were going to find their next meal.
But words do more than that. They help us define our emotions, our experiences and the things we see. Put a name to something and you have started out on the road to understanding it.
To look at the figures, you’d think that we already have more than enough words in English – estimates vary between five hundred thousand and just over two million, depending on how you count them. And most educated people use no more than twenty thousand words or so, which means that we ought to have plenty to spare. Yet we’ve all had those moments when we want to say something and we can’t find exactly the right one. Words are like happy memories – you can never have enough of them in your head.
And, maybe most important of all in these days of global interaction, when we need to understand each other more than ever before, words say something about us. If people need a word for a particular feeling, or action, or experience, it suggests that they find it important in their lives – the Australian Aboriginals, for instance, have a word that conveys a sense of intense listening, of contemplation, of feeling at one with history and with creation. In Spanish, there’s a word for running one’s fingers through a lover’s hair, and in French one for the sense of excitement and possibility that you may feel when you find yourself in an unfamiliar place.
Words bring us together. They’re precious. And if they’re sometimes very funny, too – well, how good is that?
Matters of the Heart
Physingoomai
(Ancient Greek)
Traditionally, sexual excitement as a result of eating garlic; but in a modern sense, the use of inappropriate adornments to enhance sexual attraction
THERE ARE SOME foreign words the English language clearly needs – the case for them is so obvious that it hardly needs to be put. Others require a little more advocacy on their behalf. Take, for example, the Ancient Greek word physingoomai (fiz-in-goo-OH-mie).
It refers to someone who gets over-confident and sexually excited as a result of eating garlic. Fighting cocks were frequently fed garlic and onions before a bout because the Greeks – and later cockfight aficionados – believed that it would make the birds fiercer. The idea is that if men were to follow the example of the fighting cocks and gorge on garlic before going on a date, there would be no holding them back.
Whether or not garlic makes men horny, it certainly makes them smelly and thus less pleasant to be close to. As a result, even in these days when programmes about cooking are all over the television and when people seem more than happy to talk publicly about their sexual preferences, it seems unlikely that it is a word that is going to be used frequently outside the rather restricted world of cockfighting. Even the Ancient Greeks don’t seem to have required it all that often, since the word itself appears only once in the entire canon of Greek literature, referring to some soldiers from the town of Megara in a comedy by Aristophanes.
In the play, however excited the soldiers get, it’s apparent that they are going to have serious difficulties persuading any self-respecting Ancient Greek girls to kiss their garlic-reeking lips. The remedy they have sought to increase their sexual potency at the same time greatly reduces their ability to take advantage of it.
And there lies the clue to why physingoomai would be such a useful term in English. Young men who douse themselves in the sort of cheap aftershave that strips the lining from your nasal passages at first whiff; middle-aged men wearing blue jeans so tightly belted around where their waist used to be that their bellies sag opulently over the top; women of a certain age wearing clothes that would have been daring on their daughters – they are all, if they only knew it, falling into the same trap as the Megaran soldiers.
The adornments they have chosen to boost their confidence and make them more attractive to potential partners are exactly the things that will put those partners off. Cheap aftershave, tight belts and sagging bellies, and clothes that have been clearly stolen from your daughter’s wardrobe can be as effective as a garlic overdose in keeping people at arm’s length. Instead of whatever it was they were hoping for, those who rely on them to enhance their sexual appeal are likely to suffer what we might call a physingoomai experience. And there are few more physingoomai experiences than showing off by using long words to try to impress someone. Just talking about physingoomai could lead to the most humiliating physingoomai experience of all.
Cafuné
(Brazilian Portuguese)
Closeness between two people – for example, to run one’s fingers tenderly through someone’s hair
Think for a moment of the gentleness of affection. It needs a tone and a language of its own – not the urgent, demanding words of love and passion, but gentle, undemanding affection, the sort of love that asks for nothing. It is often so diffident and unassuming that it may sometimes seem to take itself – although never its object – for granted. It may be the warm, safe, family feeling between a mother or father and their child, or the love of grandparents for their grandchildren; perhaps it is the closeness between two people that may some day turn into love, or it may be the relaxed fondness that remains when the fire of a passionate affair has burned low. Either way, it demands its own expression.
In Brazil, they have a phrase that works – fazer cafuné em alguém means to show affection of exactly that sort. More precisely, cafuné (caf-OO-neh) often describes the act of running one’s fingers through somebody’s hair – possibly lulling them to sleep, or possibly simply expressing a drowsy fellow-feeling. Between two lovers, it might contain the gentlest hint of a sexual promise, precisely capturing the tender longing of the early days of a couple’s time together.
At other times, though, the word may be translated simply as ‘affection’. Many Brazilians say they are seized by a melancholy nostalgia when they are away from their home and thinking of their family, their religion and their memories. They miss their mother’s rabanada, a sort of French toast topped with sugar, cinnamon and chocolate that is traditionally served at Christmas; their aunt’s bacalhoada, or salted cod stew; and their grandma’s cafuné.
It’s not a particularly sentimental word in itself. Some authorities suggest that the gesture originated in a mother’s gentle search through her children’s hair for fleas and lice, and if that thought isn’t enough to quell any incipient sentimentality, it’s sometimes accompanied by the clicking of the fingernails to mimic the cracking of occasional nits. There’s still plenty of affection in the gesture – like two chimpanzees gently grooming each other – though the click of lice’s eggs being destroyed is not necessarily a sound you would wish to reproduce on a Valentine’s Day card, even if you could.
Gentle, undemanding affection, the sort of love that asks for nothing.
So it doesn’t apply only to humans. You might be gently tickling the head of a much-loved dog or cat, or – Brazilians being well known for their love of horses – stroking the soft, silky hair of a horse’s ears. It’s a pleasant experience for both the giver and the receiver, and it demands nothing from either of them. So it’s a word that describes a state of mind and the action that it leads to – not urgent, not demanding, maybe even slightly distracted and carried out with a mind that is floating aimlessly around other pleasant, undemanding topics. There is room for more cafuné in our lives.
Cinq-à-Sept
(French)
The post-work period set aside for illicit love
In staid, respectable Britain, five o’clock in the afternoon signifies little more than the end of a nine-to-five working day, the peak of the rush hour and the time when a man’s chin may begin to bristle with shadow. In France, they do things differently, and with more style.
There, five o’clock marks – or used to mark – the start of le cinq-à-sept (SAÑK-a-SETT), those magical two hours that Frenchmen – or maybe Frenchwomen too, come to that – having slipped away from work, would spend whispering sweet Gallic nothings in the ears of their lovers. Or perhaps that was all part of the stereotype dreamed up by the envious English, who like to believe that everything French, whether it is maids, leave, kisses or knickers, must be slightly naughty.
In any case, by the mid-sixties the French writer Françoise Sagan was declaring in her novel La Chamade that this time for lovers was all in the past. ‘In Paris, no one makes love in the evening any more; everyone is too tired,’ sighed one of her characters.[1] It was not that the country had succumbed to a fit of English morality, just that the preferred time for illicit romance had moved forward in the afternoon to between two and four. Le cinq-à-sept had become le deux-à-quatre. The French were simply rescheduling their afternoon delight. They were not going to give up what the English referred to vulgarly as their ‘bit on the side’. After all, the wife and mistress of President Mitterrand stood side by side at his funeral; Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was rumoured to have so many mistresses that he had to leave a sealed letter saying where he might be found in case of emergency on any particular evening.
Going back further in history, the great nineteenth-century French playwright Alexandre Dumas is said to have returned home unexpectedly to find his wife in bed and, a few moments later, his best friend hiding naked in her wardrobe. With true Gallic flair, he ended up sleeping on one side of his slightly surprised wife, while the lover slept on the other.[2]
It’s worth noting that in Canada, where the French speakers have clearly lived for too many years alongside their strait-laced Anglophone compatriots, the phrase has lost its quietly salacious air: if a Québecois announces that he is going for a cinq-à-sept, he generally means no more than that he is planning to call in at the bar for happy hour.
The metropolitan French are made of sterner stuff. From Calais to the warm beaches of the Mediterranean, the true spirit of le cinq-à-sept lives on.
Démerdeur
(French)
Someone who has a talent for getting out of a fix
Drachenfutter
(German)
The apologetic gift brought to soothe a lover’s anger
It’s probably inevitable that a nation with an idea like le cinq-à-sept in its vocabulary should need another one – a word like démerdeur (DAY-MERRD-URR).
It means literally, with the bluntness of the peasant’s cottage rather than the subtlety of les aristos, someone who is proficient at getting himself out of the merde – a bit of a rascal who may often find himself in trouble but who generally works out a way to extricate himself without too much of a fuss. The French dictionary doesn’t list a feminine equivalent – if it did, it would presumably be démerdeuse – but there’s obviously no reason why women, too, shouldn’t be up to no good and similarly adept at avoiding the consequences.
Either way, there is a clear note of admiration about the word. Whatever sin you may have committed – and démerdeur is often used about the sort of misbehaviour associated with le cinq-à-sept – is more than outweighed by the imagination and dash with which you walk away from it. It’s much more direct than the rather prissy English reference to someone who ‘always comes up smelling of roses’. Deep down, just about every French man or woman would rather like to be a démerdeur or a démerdeuse.
In Germany, they do things differently. There, instead of the devil-may-care derring-do of the démerdeur, they have the careful planning and guilty foresight of the person who purchases Drachenfutter (DRACKH-en-foot-uh). Drachenfutter means ‘dragon-fodder’, and it refers to the hopeful gift, whether it be flowers, chocolates or a diamond necklace, with which you might attempt to assuage the feelings of a lover you have angered.
There’s something sly, underhand and insincere about Drachenfutter – a feeling that the person who buys that calculating little present is rather cold-hearted and cowardly. You can bet that they wouldn’t call their lover a dragon to their face. You might not want to get too close to a démerdeur either, but at least they sound like fun. You probably wouldn’t get many laughs with your Drachenfutter.
Deep down, just about every French man or woman would rather like to be a démerdeur or a démerdeuse.
Do we need either word in English? Well, there are plenty of démerdeurs to be found on this side of the Channel. Footballers, musicians, politicians, lawyers – their names are to be found in the papers often enough. As for the less adventurous among us, the number of petrol stations selling sad bunches of wilting roses suggests that there must be quite a big market for Drachenfutter.
Koi no yokan
(Japanese)
A gentle, unspoken feeling that you are about to fall in love
It’s not a coincidence that we talk of ‘falling’ in love. It’s a sudden thing, at least according to the songs – involuntary, inconvenient, irresistible, possibly even disastrous. It’s been compared, among other things, to being hit by a freight train. All in all, then, it doesn’t sound like a particularly enjoyable experience.
However, it doesn’t have to be any of those things. Just ask the Japanese. They have a phrase, koi no yokan (KOY-noh-yoh-CAN), which tells a very different story. It translates literally as ‘premonition of love or desire’, and it refers to the sense that you are about to fall in love with someone. There is no certainty, no commitment and probably no mutual awareness – certainly nothing is said – but the feeling is there. It’s not love, maybe not even desire – but it’s the realization that these things could be on the horizon.
The lazy translation into English is sometimes ‘love at first sight’, but koi no yokan is much more delicate and restrained than that. ‘Love at first sight’ is a shared surrender – glances across a room, strong emotions reflecting each other, a feeling of certainty. It’s getting your knife and fork straight into the main course, if you like, without having a starter, perhaps without even looking at the menu. Koi no yokan, on the other hand, is an individual sense of what might happen – the other person involved may at this stage know nothing of how you feel. It’s the difference between catching the faintest scent on the wind and, as we said before, being knocked down by a train. Koi no yokan senses the first tentative tremor of a feeling. It’s a surrender, above all, to the magic of potential.
Koi no yokan can be tinged with sadness as well as anticipation.
With koi no yokan, you have the feeling of a subtle, almost imperceptible awareness, the sense that it will become an emotion that will eventually grow and develop over time. It’s so gentle that you may find, with a shock, that it’s been there for some time, somewhere in the back of your mind, without your realizing it.
So subtle is it that it’s not even the moment when you stand on the brink of a love affair, wondering whether you have the courage to jump in, like jumping from a rock into a pool – it’s more the moment when you wonder whether you might step up to the rock at all.
It might not lead to love immediately, or perhaps at all, and there may be many ups and downs and twists of fate still to come. For that reason, koi no yokan can be tinged with sadness as well as anticipation. Once you’re on the rock, even if you shiver there nervously for a while, it’s hard in the end not to jump in. But at this moment, there’s no pressure on you. You could turn and walk away. And be safe. The point about koi no yokan is that it makes no promises, stakes no claims. If you do jump, it’s your own responsibility – literally a leap of faith.
Having the word doesn’t necessarily give us the feeling, but it does help us to recognize it when it happens. And we can never have enough words to describe our emotions.
Hiraeth
(Welsh)
Intense happiness at a love that was, and sadness that it is gone
Saudade
(Portuguese)
The sense of wistful melancholy experienced when reflecting on lost love
People do fall in love in English, but the language sometimes lacks the means to express the delicate ways in which the experience can affect us. Love and sadness can be inextricably intertwined; there may be a dreamy but intense happiness at the love that was, and regret that it is gone, all touched with an uneasy sense that maybe it was never really as perfect as it now seems. If English had a word for that finely judged balance of emotions when a lover is wronged or a love is lost, there might be fewer bad love songs on the radio. The Welsh, however – the earliest occupants of Britain, as they might occasionally remind you – have just such a word.
Hiraeth (HEER-eth) is a broader, more all-consuming love. It refers usually to the native Welshman’s love of Wales, its valleys, its craggy coastline, its language, its poetry and its history. But this is much more than simply homesickness. When a Welsh baritone like Bryn Terfel sings about the welcome they’ll keep in the valleys when you come home again to Wales, he also promises that he’ll banish your hiraeth with a few kisses. Coming home, he’s saying, will assuage the longing that you feel.
It’s an empty promise. This is an ache that can never be truly relieved. Because hiraeth is also a longing for unattainable past times – for your own childhood or for the historic, much-mythologized past of Wales, the days before the Saxons, or the time of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd in the thirteenth century, or of Owain Glyndŵr in the fifteenth. For many, it could be a longing for the days of Wales as an independent nation.
But what has this to do with second-rate songs on the radio? Well, hiraeth can be felt for people, too. Mae hiraeth arna amdanot ti would translate as ‘I feel hiraeth for you.’ You might translate it as simply, ‘I miss you,’ but you would be cutting away all the emotion – handing over a cheap bunch of flowers bought in a supermarket rather than a bouquet, still jewelled with dew, that you picked yourself. The Welsh version means ‘I long for you deep in my soul; I long for the way we were, for the things we did together, the places we went, the dreams that we shared – and that we may share no more.’ You could write that in a poem. The English version, ‘Wish you were here,’ you’d put on a postcard.
Welsh isn’t the only language to boast such an evocative word. The Portuguese saudade (soh-DAHD) has been memorably translated as ‘the love that’s left behind’, and it has the same connotations of wistfulness and melancholy nostalgia, whether focused on a place or a person. Back in the seventeenth century, the aristocratic soldier-poet Francisco Manuel de Melo caught its knife-edge sense of mingled pleasure and pain with his definition: ‘A pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy’ – a phrase that could apply just as well to hiraeth.
Any Welshman will tell you that the difference between the Welsh language and the English language boils down to the fact that Wales is a romantic land of bards, poets and seers, while English is spoken by accountants in suits. But an Englishman might point defensively to the poetry of A. E. Housman and his ‘Land of Lost Content’ – ‘The happy highways where I went, and cannot come again.’[3] So an Englishman can feel hiraeth, even if he doesn’t have a word for it.
Mamihlapinatapei
(Yaghan, Tierra del Fuego)
Describes the delicious uncertainty of the early days of what may or may not become a love affair
Few things, particularly emotions, are black and white.
Today, you may rather like someone who yesterday interested you only slightly. Tomorrow or the day after, you may enjoy their company even more, and sometime after that, you may fall in love. And in between each of those stages are a million shades of emotion, affection and desire that poets have struggled for centuries to define.
It’s not an area that English words are very good at capturing. The more complex our feelings, the more likely we are to have to create phrases, even sentences, to reflect them adequately – which is what poets and writers do for a living. But how wonderful to have one word that describes a single, nervous, shared moment at the beginning of that long and delicate process of falling in love – and how tragic that the language that provided it is now almost certainly extinct.
Yaghan, once spoken on the remote archipelago of Tierra del Fuego, is believed to have been one of very few languages in the world without external influences or connections with any other language on earth. It grew and developed on its own. It was spoken only by a few islanders at the very tip of South America, so far from anywhere that the islands knew only very occasional visitors, and over the last century or so it has been vanishing almost without trace – a language, a history and a culture lost as if they had never existed. The last known native speaker is now in her late eighties. Little is understood about the structure, grammar or vocabulary of Yaghan, beyond the existence of a rudimentary dictionary published in the late nineteenth century.
But one word survives: mamihlapinatapei (MAH-michk-la-pin-a-TA-pay, where the chk is pronounced at the back of the throat, like the Scottish loch). It refers to an unspoken understanding between two people, both of whom want to start something but who are each reluctant to make the first move. It’s very like the Japanese koi no yokan, then, except that this is essentially a feeling which two people share from the very start. It’s not certain whether it relates specifically to the beginning of an affair, but its relevance to those early moments where each one wonders how committed or willing the other might be is clear. It’s a word that oozes uncertainty and potential.
Many translations suggest that mamihlapinatapei includes a wordless exchange of glances, but even that seems to be too specific for this ghostly word, which seeks to pin down a moment that vanishes like mist. It’s not even certain whether it is a noun or a verb.
And the point about mamihlapinatapei is that it may not relate to the beginning of an affair, or of anything at all. Both the people involved are uncertain about what will happen next – it’s perfectly possible that nothing will and that the moment the word describes will remain one of the wistful might-have-beens that gather around the fringes of our memories.
Generally, we seek to pin words down to a particular meaning, the more specific the better. Vagueness in language is often seen as a lack of accuracy, and you would expect a legal document or a set of building instructions to be clear, concise and unambiguous. But what about when the situation you are seeking to describe is vague and uncertain? Mamihlapinatapei captures the delicacy of a subtle and nuanced moment in a way that in English would demand a sentence or a few lines of a poem.
Sticks and Stones…
Attaccabottoni
(Italian)
A bore whose only topic of conversation is him- or herself
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner tells the tale of a guest hurrying to a wedding who unwisely catches the eye of a mysterious bearded stranger and as a result sits through 143 verses of his story and misses the ceremony. It’s an experience you may have had – usually without the benefit of hearing at first hand one of the great classics of English literature – when you’ve been buttonholed by charity collectors, religious enthusiasts or political canvassers.
If only you had known the Italian word attaccabottoni (at-ACK-a-bot-OH-ni). Once you can name a danger, it’s easier to face it down, and you could have stared the stranger fearlessly in the eye, dismissively murmured, ‘Attaccabottoni’, and walked on by. It means a buttonholer, and it refers to the type of bore who manoeuvres you into a corner and proceeds to tell you the long, tedious and apparently endless story of their life, their failed relationship, their children’s success with the violin, or the massive problems they’ve solved single-handedly at work … The one thing it will always be about is them, and how cruelly and unfairly they have been treated.
It might be foolish to waste too much sympathy on Coleridge, however. His friend, the essayist Charles Lamb, used to tell a story about him which amounts to a perfect description of an attaccabottoni. Coleridge had a habit of holding on to the coat button of the person he was talking to, to impress him with the urgency of what he was saying. Then, eyes closed and making languid gestures with his other hand, he would launch into his story, without a pause for breath. Lamb claimed to have put up with this assault on his time and patience for several minutes on one occasion before he took drastic action.
A true attaccabottoni finds nothing remotely interesting but himself.
‘I saw that it was no use to break away so … with my penknife I quietly severed the button from my coat and decamped. Five hours later and passing the same garden on my way home, I heard Coleridge’s voice and, looking in, there he was with closed eyes, the button in his fingers, and his right hand gently waving, just as when I left him.’[4]
The tale sounds pretty unlikely, but it’s the sort of anecdote that ought to be true, if only because it reflects the feelings of so many of us when we are in a hurry to be somewhere but can’t bring ourselves to be rude enough to walk away. The only difference is that Coleridge was a dear friend of Lamb’s, and this story is told with a good-humoured affection that few of us feel for the earnest doorstep preachers who occasionally keep us from our dinner.
It’s easy to tell if you have just been the victim of a common or garden bore or of a dedicated and skilled attaccabottoni. Conversations should be a matter of give and take; if, as you limp away wearily from your encounter, you have a nagging feeling that you have learned a lot about the other person but said very little about yourself, then you can be sure that you have suffered at the hands of a master. A true attaccabottoni finds nothing remotely interesting but himself. Or herself – the noun can be masculine or feminine in Italian.
It might be possible to feel a degree of sympathy for an attaccabottoni – anyone who has to clap you in irons to make you stay and listen is unlikely to have a lot of friends. But you should harden your heart – your attacker is exploiting your own decency and good manners and turning them into weapons against you. It would be easy enough to tell them to shut up and walk away, if only you were ruder than you are. If by using the word attaccabottoni – which they won’t understand anyway – you can make yourself feel better about hurrying past, then you will have saved valuable minutes of your life and done no harm.
Davka
(Hebrew)
A gruff, one-word response to someone in authority
There is always room in a language for one more word, which, with its surly defiance, its refusal to engage, its sheer unreason, enables teenagers to drive adults to impotent distraction. One like the English word ‘Whatever’, which says, ‘Yes, I’ve heard you, but I’m not interested, I’m not going to pay any attention, and I’m going to keep doing exactly what it was that you said I shouldn’t.’
A word, perhaps, like the Hebrew davka (DAV-ka). It is a word with a long history, its roots reaching back into the ancient Middle Eastern language of Aramaic. It is used in the Jewish Talmud and in rabbinical commentaries on it to mean ‘precisely’ or ‘in this way and no other’. Matzah, for instance, the unleavened bread traditionally eaten during the Passover holiday, is made davka from wheat, barley, spelt, rye and oats. No other grains will do.
Today, davka retains that meaning, but it has also gathered a sense of deliberation and contrariness, so that it often has a sarcastic overtone. English sometimes pulls the same trick with the word ‘precisely’ – ‘Do you know how many biscuits he’d left me in the tin? Precisely one.’ The implication is that you might have hoped for more than that, but one was all you got, and that’s pretty much just as you’d expect.
Davka can have much the same ‘Just like him’ edge to it – ‘I asked for a red shirt, so, davka, he bought me a blue one’ – but it often has a wider implication that the world as a whole is being cruel to you. Fate is not on your side – ‘I was in a hurry, so, davka, the bus was late.’ A child who is said to be ‘doing davka’ is being contrary and difficult, in the way that children can be.
So the word has a variety of meanings, which English might try to pick up in several different ways. But the one that might be most useful – the one that Israelis speaking English say they miss most – is when it is used as a gruff, one-word response to someone in authority. In English, if you ask your surly teenage son where he is going, you might get the answer, ‘Out.’ Or if you ask your daughter what she has in her bag, ‘Stuff.’
So in Hebrew, you might ask, ‘Why are you doing that?’ and get the answer, ‘Davka’ – because I choose, because I want to do it this way rather than any other. Just because. It’s about expressing determination, independence and a degree of contempt, all in one word.
And don’t we all have a little bit of teenager in us every now and then?
Ilunga
(Tshiluba, Democratic Republic of Congo)
A willingness to let an offence go twice but never a third time
Ilunga (IL-UNG-AH) had its fifteen minutes of fame back in 2004, when the BBC reported that it had been chosen as the world’s most untranslatable word in ‘a list drawn up in consultation with 1,000 linguists’. Oddly, the article then went on to translate it with some confidence as ‘a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time’ – which seems to suggest that it’s actually quite straightforward to translate, if a little lengthy.
The idea of a word being the hardest to translate is a bit strange anyway – certainly until you’ve defined which language you’re translating into. A word that’s hard to translate into English may have a perfect equivalent in Korean or Welsh.
A gradual, even unwilling diminution of sympathy.
Ilunga comes from the Bantu Tshiluba language, spoken by some six million people in the southern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Other commentators weighed in to the BBC immediately with their own suggestions, including several who put forward the American saying ‘Three strikes and you’re out’ as an equivalent.
For anyone who knows nothing about the rules of baseball, that sentence would itself be pretty hard to translate, and that fact seems to highlight one of the most intractable difficulties of translation. It’s all very well to replace one word with another – a carretilla in Spain, or a schubkarre in Germany, would probably look very much like a wheelbarrow in England – but it’s the unspoken assumptions and cultural implications that go with a word that can make it almost impossible to replicate in a different language.
‘Three strikes and you’re out’ has a threatening ring to it – an implication that justice is implacable and inevitable. The rules of baseball, after all, are very clear and brook no argument on the subject, which is the reason for carrying the phrase into the administration of the criminal law: there will be no argument and no plea in mitigation. It might even sound rather smug.
That’s certainly not the case with the meaning of ilunga, which describes a gradual, even unwilling diminution of sympathy. The emphasis is on the mercy that is shown at first, rather than on the condemnation that will eventually follow – precisely the opposite of ‘Three strikes and you’re out.’
It may be unrealistic to think that we are such a patient and forgiving people that we need a word which suggests that our first instinct in response to any injury would be forgiveness, and that our preference is always to show mercy until the offender has demonstrated once and for all that he is just going to take advantage of our gentleness. But it’s a very nice idea.
Schlimazl & Shlemiel
(Yiddish)
Someone prone to accidental mishaps & someone clumsy who creates their own mishaps
We all have moments when it seems as if the world is ganging up against us – moments when we’ve spent an hour getting ourselves ready for an important occasion, with a new suit and freshly polished shoes, only for a car to drive past through a puddle and cover us with mud. Moments when we’ve written a particularly fine letter on our computer and are just about to print it out when there’s a power cut. Moments when we sit down on a broken chair that collapses beneath us, or lean against a door that’s just been painted.
We all go through those Charlie Chaplin experiences that would seem very funny if only they were happening to someone else but are near-disasters when they happen to us. For most of us they don’t really happen all that often – it just feels as if they do. But suppose they happened to you all the time – what would you be then, apart from suicidal?
For some people, petty disasters do seem to be a way of life. And if you’re one of them, you’re a schlimazl (shli-MAZL). It’s an old Yiddish word that means someone who is chronically unlucky, someone to whom bad things happen all the time. These mishaps are probably nobody’s fault, and they’re not tragedies, not disasters that are going to ruin a person’s life, but they are the ridiculous little accidents that can drive you to distraction. Why me, you say.
However, it could be worse. Suppose it was all your own fault? Rather than have a random car drive past and soak you, you might have tripped over into the puddle all by yourself, stumbling over the shoelace you hadn’t tied properly. Instead of a power cut, you might have lost your beautifully crafted letter because you’d turned off the computer by accident. Maybe the chair was fine, but you were just too heavy for it. And how much more annoying would it have been if you’d painted the door yourself?
In those cases, it would be your own foolishness or clumsiness that was to blame, and instead of being a hapless schlimazl you’d be a hopeless shlemiel (shlum-EEL). At least if you’re a schlimazl, when people have finished laughing at you, they’ll feel a moment of sympathy for your hard luck. If you’re a shlemiel, a person who is so clumsy and awkward that you only have to pick up something fragile to drop it, then the chances are that the only response you’re likely to get will be a sneering ‘Serves you right.’
And there are refinements of this miserable fate. Sometimes the shlemiel will resent the reputation he has acquired so much that he will try to do ambitious things that even someone who is not naturally clumsy would avoid, just to prove that he’s not as clumsy as everyone thinks. He – or she – will carry tottering piles of plates and glasses, or scoff at the idea of putting down a piece of newspaper before they start painting. The shlemiel will balance a bowl of soup on his outstretched fingers and move it around in the air, just to prove that he can. And, of course, he can’t. It always ends in tears. Not even Yiddish has a word for such a hopeless case. In fact, the bowl of soup can be used as an example to demonstrate the difference between the two: when the shlemiel spills his soup, it lands on the schlimazl.
The two words are ideal as light-hearted insults – the sort of remarks that elicit a rueful smile and a shrug of the shoulders from their object, rather than a punch on the nose. Surely a language can never have too many words like that.
Mafan
(Mandarin)
When it’s all too much bother but, to your mind, not being bothered is not your fault …
We all have them – those moments of angst, world-weariness and frustration when something is just too much trouble. It may be something we’ve done a thousand times before without complaining – taking out the rubbish, washing the car or taking the dog for a walk. Suddenly, for no particular reason, it’s just one thing too many and we’re not going to do it.
‘I can’t be bothered,’ we might say, and it’s likely to make people cross. And, most of the time, and probably with ill grace, we somehow end up doing whatever it is that needs doing.
That’s the problem with ‘I can’t be bothered.’ It’s a blunt phrase that, just at a time when you really don’t feel like taking responsibility, puts you right in the firing line. It’s not what you want to say: the problem is with the suddenly unreasonable demand that is being made, not with your own response to it. What you want is a phrase that throws the blame where you instinctively know it belongs – on the person who has made the request, on the action itself, on the entire world if necessary, but not on you.
The Chinese have an invaluable little word – mafan (MAH-FAHN). Some people say that if you learn only one word of Chinese, then mafan is the one – although that could be a reflection on the frustrations of Chinese bureaucracy rather than a comment on the word itself.
It means something you’ve been asked to do is too bothersome – just too much trouble. It’s frustrating, annoying and completely unreasonable that you have been asked. But the important thing about it is that it focuses the blame where it should be – not on you.
Its applications are almost infinite. A tax form may be too complicated for anyone but a Professor of Incomprehensible Logic to understand, and you would ask, ‘Why is this so mafan?’ Or it could be used against you in a restaurant, when you ask if you could have the noodles but without the meat – ‘No, that’s too mafan for the chef.’
And the beauty of it is that it’s not an exclusively dismissive or negative word. You can apologize – probably insincerely, but no one’s to know – for causing someone so much mafan. Tack -ni, meaning ‘you’, on to it and it is suddenly an extremely polite and courteous way of asking a question, more or less equivalent to ‘Excuse me, may I trouble you?’ So you might say, ‘Mafan-ni, could you tell me the way to the station?’
But we do politeness well in English already. We have plenty of ingratiating little phrases with which to butter people up when we want them to do us a favour. It’s that subtle evasion of responsibility that we need, that deft avoidance of blame. ‘Shouldn’t you take the dog for a walk?’ ‘Mafan.’
It shouldn’t work, of course. It would seem to drip with the same sort of dismissive contempt that an idle teenager can pour over the words ‘Whatever,’ or ‘Yeah, right.’ But the Chinese seem to manage mafan quite successfully. Perhaps we should give it a go in English.
Pochemuchka
(Russian)
Term of endearment for a child who asks a lot of questions – perhaps too many questions
‘Yes, but why?’
As anyone who has children will know, these words bring a thrill of joy to our hearts the first time we hear them, because we are new parents, and idealistic, and optimistic, and we want to encourage a healthy curiosity in our offspring. And so we offer a carefully crafted and well-thought-out explanation, not too simple but pitched at exactly the right level for our child’s understanding.
‘Yes, but why?’
The next explanation has a slightly puzzled edge to it. We thought we’d answered that one the first time. So we try again.
‘Yes, but why?’
The third explanation is probably a little shorter and slightly less carefully crafted. It might even have a barely perceptible edge of frustration. There is, after all, a newspaper that we want to read, or a programme to watch, or a car to polish.
‘Yes, but why?’
The fourth explanation is even shorter. It may well contain an unfortunate phrase like ‘For God’s sake!’ in it, or possibly something even less acceptable. And so it goes on, six or seven times or more, until, to our eternal shame, we come through clenched teeth to the final and unavoidable, ‘Because I say so!’
The diminutive suffix -uchka makes clear that it’s meant affectionately.
This child with the healthy curiosity that we were once so keen to encourage is what the Russians would call a pochemuchka (POH-chay-MOO-chka) – someone who asks too many questions. It comes from the Russian word pocemu (POH-chay-MUH), which means ‘Why?’, and was first used in a popular Soviet-era children’s book[5] whose hero was a little boy given the nickname Alyosha Pochemuchka because he was never satisfied with the answers he got. The book was published in 1939, when Stalin was at the height of his power, so discouraging children from trying to find out too much was probably a wise move for cautious parents, but it’s generally the sort of light-hearted put-down that might be expressed in English with a warning like ‘Curiosity killed the cat.’
The diminutive suffix -uchka makes clear that it’s meant affectionately, but do we really need a word like this? Once we’ve got over the frustration of a long train of ‘Yes, but whys’, we don’t really want to tell our children not to ask too many questions.
But the term doesn’t have to be applied only to children. It may not be a clever way to address a Russian policeman who is asking you for details of where you’ve been and whom you’ve seen, but assimilated into English it might be a very useful word to use to a local government official who won’t go away, or anyone in authority for whom it would be much less aggressive than a bad-tempered ‘Mind your own business.’ That patronizing -uchka at the end, the verbal equivalent of patting the person you are speaking to on the head, might also give a very pleasant feeling of superiority.
Schnorrer
(Yiddish)
Someone very skilled at getting others to pay out of a sense of duty
Make the mistake of getting out of a taxi without leaving a big enough tip and you may hear the taxi driver mutter under his breath, ‘Schnorrer!’ (SHNORR-uh). This, you will understand instinctively, is not a compliment.
Originally, the word was used by Jews about Jews, describing a dishonest beggar – a man, for example, who might dress as a gentleman, talk with all the pretensions of a scholar and treat his companion with expansive and condescending civility, but who would still ask for the loan of the price of a phone call. And then ask again. And again for something else.
Such a man would give elaborate and generally entirely imaginary reasons for asking for help – he might have been robbed, his house might have burned down, or he might find himself temporarily embarrassed at a moment when he needs to pay to get his car mended, settle an annoying bill, or offer assistance to a relative who has fallen on hard times. In any case, since both the schnorrer and generally his victim as well are Jewish, there is an overriding moral duty to help him. The more emotional and affecting the story, the better.
A particular kind of schnorrer, the literary schnorrer, might offer copies of a book he has written – always a literary masterpiece, in which he has selflessly invested years of hard and unrewarded work – in return for whatever gift of money the wealthy recipient thinks appropriate. And if the gift is not large enough, the schnorrer is likely to make it very clear that he is unimpressed.
Rather than sitting at the roadside asking for alms, the schnorrer engages with his target, giving the impression that he expects support as of right and is actually conferring a favour by offering the opportunity to give him money or goods. The frequent translation ‘beggar’ fails to reflect the impudence and presumption of the true schnorrer, whose shameless audacity is best summed up in another Yiddish word, chutzpah (HOOT-spa). Other words like ‘sponger’, ‘chiseller’ or ‘freeloader’ miss the all-important element of entitlement, while ‘con man’ or ‘confidence trickster’ do not include the sense of duty that the true schnorrer seeks to instil in his victim.
The English writer Israel Zangwill, working at the end of the nineteenth century, published a satirical novel named The King of Schnorrers, which tells the story of a Sephardic Jew, the grandly named Manasseh Bueno Barzillai Azevedo da Costa, who plays on his claims of scholarship, family background and royal connections to fleece a succession of more or less gullible victims. More ironically, the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl, around the same time, said that the best-kept secret of his campaign was the work of ‘an army of schnorrers possessing a dream’ who hassled and persuaded and cajoled Jews across Europe to support his idea of a Jewish state.
Your taxi driver is probably not remembering these literary antecedents and probably not even thinking of the traditional characteristics of the Jewish schnorrer. He is simply using the best word available to describe a tightwad, a miser, a Scrooge and a skinflint, all rolled together and invested with all the contempt, mockery and derision that the Yiddish language can muster.
Or nearly all. If you don’t leave any tip, you may hear the word schnorrerdicke (SHNORR-uh-DICK-uh). That means the same, but much, much more so. Better by far to give him his tip in the first place – and make it a big one.
Handschuhschneeballwerfer & Sitzpinkler
(German)
A man who is a bit of a wimp
Few national stereotypes can be as undeserved as the reputation that the Germans have picked up for having no sense of humour. How can that possibly be true of a people who speak a language with words that are seventy-nine letters long? Their habit of creating a new compound word by the simple expedient of sticking together two, three, four or more old ones would seem logically to mean that German can translate any number of words in any language with just one of its own.
Practical stuff. But how could you use a word like Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbau-unterbeamtengesellschaft without sniggering? It means ‘The association for junior officials of the head office management of the Danube steamboat electrical services’, and if any journalist were ever foolish enough to use it, it would run into three lines of a single column in a broadsheet newspaper – not that it crops up much in conversation. I suspect that, like its rather less impressive English equivalents antidisestablishmentarianism (opposition to a policy of taking away the Church of England’s special role in the state) or floccinaucinihilipilification (the act of valuing something as practically worthless), Donaudampfschiffahrt etc. is one of those words cobbled together simply to give schoolchildren something to laugh and marvel at.
So the German language’s capacity for making new compounds from old words results in more than just astonishing length. It also gives the language an enviable sense of fun. Take handschuhschneeballwerfer (hant-shoo-SHNAY-ball-vairf-uh) and sitzpinkler (SIT-spink-luh), for instance. Each of them arrives at pretty much the same meaning, although they take a different route to get there. And you probably wouldn’t want either of them to be applied to you.
A handschuh is, literally, a ‘hand-shoe’ – a glove. (If you couldn’t work that out for yourself, you haven’t got into the spirit of compound words.) Schnee is snow, so schneeball is pretty obvious; and the verb werfen is what you do to one. So a handschuhschneeballwerfer is a person who wears gloves to throw snowballs. That is not interpreted, as you might think, as someone who has at least an ounce of common sense but as someone who is scared to get his hands cold – hence, a bit of a wuss, a wimp or a softy.
These days you wouldn’t translate that word into English as ‘a big girl’. For sitzpinkler, however, that might just be an ideal translation. A sitz is a seat, and pinkeln is what you might do privately while you were sitting down, if you happen to be a woman. (I’m making an effort to be delicate here.) So a sitzpinkler is a man who sits down to pee, hence a man who behaves like a woman, and hence – well, someone who’s not very macho in a patriarchal society where real men used to show off their duelling scars.
In an English conversation, each of these two words has the advantage of being mildly insulting in a way that won’t be understood and therefore won’t get you into trouble. But, if you are sufficiently sexist to want to use sitzpinkler as a term of abuse, you should be warned that times are changing. In these metrosexual days, it might actually be taken as a compliment. Signs have appeared in some German toilets warning that stehpinkeln (the opposite of sitzpinkeln) is messy and antisocial. Gadgets exist that play a recorded message to that effect every time a defiant man raises the seat. These warnings come in a variety of voices, including those of the former chancellors Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schröder.
Imagine some British manufacturer bringing out a similar gadget using the voices of Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair or David Cameron. But maybe that would be taking the cliché of the nanny state just a bit too far.
Soutpiel
(Afrikaans)
Scorn expressed at someone else’s inability to commit fully to something you believe in passionately
Sometimes, just sometimes, it’s necessary to be vulgar to get your point across with sufficient force. Take the occasions, for instance, when you are fully committed to an idea or a project, and you have poured yourself heart and soul into ensuring its success. There will be no second thoughts for you – you have burned your bridges, and you’re not looking back.
Perhaps it’s a minor issue, like playing for a football team or joining a political party, or perhaps it’s something life-changing, not just for you but for generations to come – something like building a nation, for instance.
You’ll hope that your commitment will inspire others to follow you – if it doesn’t, you may be doomed to failure – but you expect those who follow to feel the same level of enthusiasm and single-mindedness when they join as you had right at the beginning. Instead, as the venture begins to show the first signs that it is going to work, you find people flocking to reap the fruits of your hard work while carefully preserving their way out in case things go wrong.
Instead of diving in alongside you, they are constantly looking back nervously over their shoulders, ready to pull out and run for cover the first time things take a turn for the worse.
What’s the word you would choose to describe such people? ‘Freeloaders’ might do, except that it doesn’t carry the sense of cowardly retrospection that you are looking for. ‘Fainthearts’ the same – and neither one begins to touch the contempt and ridicule that you want to express.
That is the problem, early in the twentieth century, which faced the Afrikaaner farmers of South Africa – a people who, with some justification, did not enjoy a good press during much of that century. They felt that the English settlers who had flooded out there after the Boer War were never wholeheartedly committed to the future of South Africa, that they maintained close links to Europe, with property and investments ‘back home’ as an insurance policy in case they needed to cut and run.
‘Soutpiel,’ (SOHT-peel) some leathery-faced old Boer must have spat into the dust as he chewed his biltong. The word means literally, in Afrikaans, ‘salt-dick’, and at that moment he gave to the world the memorable image of someone standing with one foot in South Africa and the other in England, his legs stretched so that his penis dangled in the sea. The same thought might apply today to those in England who want to stay in the European Union but defend Britain’s right to do things differently, or perhaps the many celebrities who seem to live on both sides of the Atlantic at once.
Today, soutpiel has been softened into the almost affectionate ‘soutie’ (SOHT-y), and in town if not in the rural Afrikaaner heartland, English-speaking South Africans may even sometimes use it to describe themselves.
Other former colonial nations have coined their own less-than-respectful names for the citizens of the mother country. The Americans have limey, a contemptuous reference to the lime juice that would be added to the Royal Navy’s rum ration during the nineteenth century – a sneer that rather backfired, as the vitamin C in the lime juice did at least keep the sailors free from scurvy and the oozing wounds, loose teeth, jaundice, fever and death to which it led.
In Australia, no one really knows where the term Pom comes from, though there have been several unconvincing explanations such as Pomegranate, describing the colour that the fair-skinned English went in the sun, or P.O.H.M.S., short for Prisoner of Her Majesty’s Service. The Scots have Sassenach, which means Saxon, not necessarily affectionately, and shows what long memories the Celts have.
But nothing matches the scorn and derision of that vivid Afrikaaner image of the Englishman stretching desperately to keep a foot in both countries, with his pride and joy dangling disconsolately in the chilly waters of the South Atlantic.
Elusive Emotions
Aware
(Japanese)
A sense of the fragility of life
You might, on a walk in late summer, see a leaf gently float down to the ground from a high branch. Perhaps you may come downstairs one morning to see that the vase of flowers that last night looked so fresh and full of life has begun to lose its petals. Or you might watch the reds and golds of a beautiful sunset gradually fade away as the sun sinks in the sky.
Any of those experiences might bring you a feeling that the Japanese would call aware (ah-WAH-reh) – a deep sense of beauty, coloured by the realization that what you are looking at is fragile and fleeting. It is this sense of the impermanence of beauty that lies at the heart of aware.
For the Japanese, it is often expressed in the aesthetic concept of mono no aware, which translates roughly as ‘the pathos of things’. Nearly seven hundred years ago in Tsurezuregusa, or Essays in Idleness, the Japanese poet and hermit Yoshida Kenkō observed that if people lived for ever, then material things would lose their power to move us. ‘The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty,’ he said.[6]
For the Japanese, one very common expression of aware is in the contemplation of the cherry blossom, which usually lasts only a few days before it begins to fall. In the parks and gardens of Tokyo, silent groups will gather in early April just to look at the array of blossom on the trees as the flowers slowly wilt and die. Coincidentally – and showing that emotions are universal, even though English may lack the precise words to express them – back in late nineteenth-century England, the shy, buttoned-up poet A. E. Housman also chose the cherry blossom to express his own sense of the fragility of beauty and of human life.
In the poem ‘Loveliest of Trees’, at the age of twenty, with only fifty years remaining of his allotted span, he says:
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodland I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.[7]
The spring blossom has turned in his mind to the snow of winter – a chilly symbol of mortality. The mixture of appreciation, thoughtfulness and regret comes close to the heart of the meaning of aware.
The cycle of the seasons, with growth, maturity and death exhibited in falling petals and dying leaves, is the traditional way to demonstrate aware, but it applies throughout life. A glimpse of a faded photograph on an old woman’s mantelpiece showing her as a young bride; the dry, curled pages of a precious childhood book; a crisp, shrivelled leaf about to crumble away into nothingness – all these could inspire the same wistful sense of inescapable mortality.
There is sadness, but it is a calm, resigned sadness, and it is coupled with a humble acceptance of the beauty of existence. Perhaps the whole concept might seem maudlin at first glance, except that the concentration is not on death and the end of everything but on the fact of its existence. It is a bittersweet emotion but essentially a positive and life-affirming one.
Cocok
(Javanese)
A perfect fit
Speakers of English, it seems, would like to be seen as a tolerant, non-judgemental, open-minded lot. We have the phrases and proverbs to prove it: ‘One man’s meat is another man’s poison’, ‘Each to his own’, ‘You pays your money and you takes your choice’. We are not going to be dogmatic about what is best or worst, we are saying: people have their own preferences, and we respect them.
But if the non-judgemental self-image were true – if we really were so unwilling to lay down the law and tell other people what they should think – surely we would have a single word to express the idea, rather than having to rely on a few hackneyed clichés? A word we could use, for example, if someone asked us if we knew a good restaurant, or if a book was worth reading, or whether a particular model of car was any good.
As it is, we can say the restaurant, the book or the car are good, or bad, or somewhere in between, and we may think we’re being helpful. But the truth is that you may hate the sort of food that someone else enjoyed in the restaurant, you may be bored by the book that they found fascinating, and you may find the car that they drive and love a bit uncomfortable and old-fashioned. We each have our preferences.
What we need is a word like the Javanese cocok (cho-CHOCH, with the final ch pronounced as in the Scottish loch).
An inadequate translation into English might be ‘suitable’, although cocok can be either an adjective or a verb: a thing can be cocok or it can cocok. I could say that the restaurant, or the book, or the car would be cocok for you – that you would like them. But that is only scratching the surface of this fascinating and beautiful word. One leading anthropologist has suggested that cocok means to fit like a key in a lock, or to be exactly right, like the medicine that cures a disease. Javanese villagers might say that their greatest ambition for their children is that they should find a job which is cocok. If two people agree in such a way that the view of each one not only supports the other but brings to it subtleties and nuances that the other person had not thought of, then their opinions will be cocok.
In its purest sense, the word means that two things fit together so perfectly that each one gains meaning and value from the other: together, they are greater than the sum of their parts. It has its philosophical roots in Kejawen, a Javanese synthesis of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and animism, which sees the whole of creation as an intricate fitting together of its disparate parts – everything visible and invisible, past, present and future. That is the aim both of the individual soul and of creation itself; everything that is cocok is part of a greater, eternal metaphysical harmony.
If that sounds a rather grandiose way to express a preference for one restaurant over another, a liking for a particular book, or the choice of one car above all others, then that’s probably because you haven’t bought into the concept. The Javanese themselves might use cocok to describe their food, their clothing, or even their government. And, after all, however good a restaurant meal may be, left alone it will simply congeal and go mouldy; eaten, it will become part of you, while you will have a satisfied, fulfilled feeling of well-being and grow strong and healthy.
But perhaps if English speakers can’t accept the world view from which the word comes, then English doesn’t really need the word. Certainly, anyone who asks in English if a car is any good will look a bit strangely at you if you tell them it’s cocok; maybe the sense of oneness with the harmony of the eternal universe is a cultural step too far for us to take in our daily lives.
Except …
If you are lucky enough to have found the partner who is the one person in the world with whom you can envisage spending your life, one who understands you and feels like part of you, then you might one night murmur in his or her ear that they are truly cocok and explain what the word means. And then just wait for the result. It beats flowers or chocolates.
Duende
(Spanish)
Visceral or spiritual feeling evoked by the arts
William Wordsworth observed that poetry had its roots in ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’[8] – that a poet might experience the heights and depths of emotion, but he needed time and calm to transform them into poetry. His words have become inseparable from the English Romantic movement. But they remain only a pale and partial shadow of the Spanish concept of duende (duEND-eh), which is the soul or spirit at the heart of music, poetry or any artistic performance.
In Spanish and Portuguese mythology, the word referred to a sprite or fairy that might play tricks on travellers astray in the forest, or sometimes to a more sinister red-robed skeletal figure who carried a scythe and presaged death. Those whom he visited could sometimes be inspired, in their fear and mental turmoil, to heights of creative brilliance. That quality of inspiration is at the heart of the word’s more modern meaning.
According to the twentieth-century Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, other inspirations for creativity – the muses or the angels – come from outside the artist, but duende comes from deep within. It needs, Lorca said, ‘the trembling of the moment, and then a long silence’ – a little like Wordsworth’s thought, then. Duende, though, goes much further. For artists or performers, it may produce a moment of shattering brilliance, a complete absorption in their art, like the abandoned ecstasy of a Spanish dancer; and without it, the most technically perfect production will be lifeless, without soul. In his 1933 lecture, ‘Play and Theory of the Duende’,[9] Lorca tells the story of an accomplished singer being told: ‘You have a voice, you understand style, but you’ll never ever succeed because you have no duende.’
The ghostly scythe still lurks in the background. For Lorca, duende would only truly manifest itself when there was also an instinctive awareness of the possibility and inevitability of death. The artist could only live fully in the moment when he knew deep in his soul that it could be the last moment. Lorca linked duende with the passion of the Spanish bullring, but he believed that all Spanish art, particularly the performing arts of music and dancing, was inextricably linked with the contemplation, the fear and the glorification of death. Other artists, though, see duende as a quieter, more peaceable manifestation of unrepeatable and often inexplicable artistic brilliance. The Australian musician Nick Cave, for instance, says that it involves ‘an eerie and inexplicable sadness’, and refers to the music of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison and Neil Young.
‘All love songs must contain duende, for the love song is never truly happy,’ he said at a lecture in Vienna in 1999. ‘Within the fabric of the love song, within its melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering.’[10]
So musicians, singers, dancers and other creative artists may channel duende through their work. And for those who experience a work of art – the ones who watch the dancer or hear the music – duende will manifest itself as a sudden, potentially life-changing moment of insight, an instant in which time seems to have stopped. It is beyond analysis, beyond explanation, beyond criticism – art experienced in the deepest recesses of the soul.
For many people, Wordsworth’s calm prescription still remains the best way to understand the spirit of poetry, the indescribable something that makes it different from prose. The concept of duende, however, considers a similar problem in the context of all artistic expression and approaches it from an infinitely more personal, intense and intimate point of view. However it’s described, if you’ve never experienced duende, you may never take its meaning fully on board. But if you have, then you will understand the word not just with your brain but in the very pit of your stomach.
Hygge
(Danish)
Emotional warmth created by being with good friends and well-loved family
Years ago there was a television advertisement for drinking chocolate. It started outside on a chilly winter’s night. A lone figure, wrapped up against the cold, was walking briskly down the street, his feet beating a regular rhythm on the paving stones. He was on his way home and, as he got closer, and the night got colder, so the sound of his feet began to quicken, until eventually he was running as fast as he could.
He stopped outside a front door that loomed in front of him, cold and unpromising; he turned the handle, pushed it open and walked inside. And everything changed. Sitting around were his family, with happy, welcoming faces, all luxuriating in the glow of a warming log fire. And there, waiting for him, was a steaming mug of hot chocolate. He wrapped both hands around it with a broad and satisfied smile, and the background music swelled.
It was an advertisement for hot chocolate, which you might think is just a sickly sweet drink that rots your teeth and makes you fat. But it could just as well have been an advertisement for hygge.
Hygge (HEU-guh) is a Danish word that helps the Danes get through their long, dark winters. It’s sometimes translated, inadequately, as cosiness or well-being, but it is specifically about the reassuring emotional warmth, comfort and security that come from being with good friends or well-loved family. The glow of a roaring log burner is often a part of it, but dinner around a restaurant table, with the conversation and laughter swinging easily back and forth, could be hygge. So could flickering candlelight, with a glass of wine and a favourite companion, or a favourite seat in a bar or cafe. When the weather doesn’t make you warm, hygge does, wrapping your love and your friendships around you like a fur coat.
But it’s an emotional warmth that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the temperature. Making a snowman with your children – however old they are – is hygge. And it doesn’t even have to be winter – a Danish summer street festival could be a very hygge place to be, with the right company, or a picnic in the open air, or a late-night barbecue. It’s all about comradeship and an awareness of the deep and sustaining happiness and sense of security that it brings.
The concept is central to the Danes’ image of themselves: to be called a hyggelig fyr, or a fellow who is fun to be with, or who inspires a feeling of hygge, is about as high a compliment as you can hope for. And to be the opposite – uhyggeligt – is to be creepy and scary in a Gothic horror movie kind of way, not just a bit grumpy and unsociable. The idea of hygge gets you through the winter, they say, but it’s more than that – it gets you through life.
The traditional English stereotype is all about firm handshakes and a stiff upper lip rather than anything so emotional as hygge. But an Englishman might protest that it’s easy to misinterpret what seems to be a brusque and buttoned-up handshake. Ruffling your child’s hair as he’s about to set off for his first day at school, gripping the hand of your son as he boards a plane for a long journey, or squeezing your daughter’s arm before you walk down the aisle with her – these could all be very hygge moments indeed. We certainly experience it. And now we have a word for it.
Litost
(Czech)
Torment caused by an acute awareness of your own misery and the wider suffering of humanity in general
The Czech Republic sits at the vulnerable, much-fought-over centre of Europe. Through the last century, the history of the region was largely one of invasion, occupation, tyranny and bloodshed. Under the Nazis in 1939, vast swathes of Czech territory were incorporated into Hitler’s ‘Greater Germany’ – part of the price Britain and its allies were prepared to pay for Neville Chamberlain’s tragic boast of ‘peace for our time’. The occupation that followed was bloody and brutal, and so was the liberation. They were followed at the end of the Second World War by a second dismemberment, this time by the Soviet Union, and then forty years of Communist repression, with the brief flowering of the Prague Spring ruthlessly crushed by tanks in 1968.
It’s little wonder, with a history like that, that the Czechs should have come up with a word like litost (LEE-tossed).
It is, according to the Czech writer Milan Kundera, ‘a state of torment caused by the sudden sight of one’s own misery’. In his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,[11] he notes that the long first syllable sounds ‘like the wail of an abandoned dog’. Love may be a cure for litost, but when the first passionate flush of idealized desire is past, love can also be a source of it. The emotion is, he says mischievously, a torment that is particularly felt by the young, since anyone with any experience of life will know how commonplace and tedious his own self-regarding misery is.
But that’s only part of the story. As a novelist, Kundera focuses on the individual – on the student in his novel wallowing in his own unhappiness, for instance. Litost, however, can also be a more wide-ranging feeling, a concentration on our misery rather than my misery. It could be a sudden emotional awareness of the unfitness of things – a realization of the indiscriminate way that death was meted out in the Yugoslav civil wars, of the tsunami-like disaster of the Holocaust crashing down on Europe, or of the succession of miseries that have afflicted the region where the Czechs live. It doesn’t have to be as inward-looking as Kundera suggests. But he’s correct to point out that it’s generally a negative or unproductive emotion that is often followed by the desire for revenge. The rape of Czechoslovakia by the Nazis was followed by the murder of innocent German-speaking civilians at the end of the war.
According to Kundera, litost may be dissipated in extreme circumstances by suicide, by violence against the person who has inspired it, or even by provoking them to kill you. For most of us, then, it’s definitely not an emotion to be encouraged, since violence, injury and self-destruction are not generally viewed as desirable outcomes.
There is nothing to joke about in the misery of depression, which can strike suddenly, unpredictably and brutally. But litost seems somehow self-regarding and posturing, almost like the existential angst of a teenager. Even when litost is more wide-ranging, focusing on shared misery, it is still all about the effect of that misery on me. Thinking of those who die in conflicts, or the victims of the Holocaust, and agonizing over how unhappy they make you feel, seems to lose sight of the point.
There is no English equivalent even though the word describes a state of mind that is more common than we would like to believe. Perhaps we need the word in the language, if only to do our best to avoid the emotion it describes.
Fernweh
(German)
The longing, or need, to be far away – anywhere else
It was a long way from home, but there was no doubting his accent. The young man behind the bar in Auckland looked every inch a Kiwi, with his tattooed arms and his All Blacks T-shirt, but his voice said ‘West Midlands’. So we exchanged a couple of words as he drew my pint.
‘Gap year?’ I asked, and he paused for a moment. There was a long, slow grin, and he raised one eyebrow quizzically.
‘Gap life, with a bit of luck,’ he replied.
The old idea of a gap year as a character-forming break between school and university or between university and the world of work has changed. Now there are sixty-somethings setting off around the world, selling their homes or blowing their pension funds to pay for the journey. And among the youngsters who still make up the vast majority, one year often isn’t enough. More and more of them, unenthused by the idea of returning home to fight for insecure jobs in an economy that doesn’t seem to want them, are thinking rather of two years, or even more. ‘Gap life, with a bit of luck.’
At a time like this we need a word like Fernweh (FAIRN-vee).
It’s a German word that goes back to the twelfth or thirteenth century, and it translates literally as ‘far-sickness’ – the opposite of Heimweh, or ‘home-sickness’. It’s a desire to travel – not to anywhere in particular, but just to get away, to leave your familiar surroundings and hit the open road. It might last a few months or a few years, or it might consume the rest of your life, but you know that the only way to find yourself is to find new places, new horizons, new experiences. It could describe the feelings of those young and old gap-lifers alike.
Except that there is a darker side to Fernweh. The vast majority of travellers set off with a song in their hearts, a joyful wish to get to wherever it is they are going and then perhaps move on again. They are motivated primarily by an optimistic wish to see what the world has to offer. For them, the more familiar wander-lust (another word originally from Germany) might be adequate – as it is for many English translators searching for a suitable rendition of Fernweh.
It might last a few months or it might consume the rest of your life.
The word Fernweh was infused with the spirit of the German Romanticism of the early nineteenth century – and, like many of the Romantics themselves, it had a bleak, obsessive edge to it. Without travel, a person who experienced Fernweh would feel an overwhelming lassitude, a sadness, a sense of depression that could all too easily develop into a suicidal longing for the last long journey of all. The difference between wanderlust and Fernweh is the difference between enjoying a few convivial drinks with your friends and drinking alone, long into the night, because you have to.
Dadirri
(Ngangikurungkurr, Australia)
Contemplation of one’s place in the world, involving wonder and humility
The many languages of the Australian Aboriginals are particularly rich in their evocation of the sounds, smells, sights and textures of the natural world, and it’s easy to see why. Throughout their 40,000-year history, the Aboriginal peoples have lived in close proximity to the land, and their very survival has depended on their ability to distinguish between one tree and another, to read the likely weather from particular cloud formations, or to recognize specific sounds in the Australian bush.
Many of the Aboriginal languages have no single word for ‘tree’, but only words for each particular kind of tree; several have words for the smell of rain (nyimpe in Arrernte, spoken around Alice Springs, or panti wiru in Pitjantjatjara, spoken in Central Australia). They contain a vast repository of practical knowledge about the pharmaceutical and nutritional properties of Australian plants and animals.
But a single word that draws together much of this affinity with the natural world is dadirri, from the Ngangikurungkurr language spoken in Australia’s Northern Territory. It’s generally translated into English as ‘contemplation’, but it has a much richer and more spiritual meaning than that. Another translation is ‘deep listening’, which catches more of the sense of quiet, stillness and attention that the word suggests.
However, it goes far beyond simply listening to the natural world. Dadirri might describe the rapt attention paid to the ancient sacred stories about the tribe that have been told or sung for hundreds or thousands of years around a succession of campfires. It might be inspired by the ritual music and dancing of a corroboree, at tribal smoking ceremonies, or by the haunting music of the didgeridoo. In that sense – an awareness of the history and culture of the tribe – it can be felt both as the listener and the performer.
Dadirri implies a sense of wonder and humility, an almost mystical awareness of one’s individual place in the great mystery of Creation. It focuses attention on both the vastness of the external worlds of time and space, and on the inner thoughts and emotions of the individual as a part of that greater whole.
It is not hard to see why this mystic combination of humility and self-awareness was taken up by Christian churches in the centuries since European explorers arrived in Australia, nor how the identification of the individual with the natural world is relevant to more recent concerns about sustainability and environmental awareness.
There is a growing belief in many English-speaking societies in the benefits of mindfulness, an awareness of the present moment, of your own thoughts and feelings, and of the world around you. Doctors, counsellors, coaches and the NHS recommend it as a way of combatting stress and improving mental well-being.
How much better to be aware of oneself not just in the present moment but in the context of hundreds or thousands of years of history. Several Aboriginal writers and thinkers have suggested that dadirri could be the gift of their peoples to modern Australia – an idea and a word whose time has come.[12]
Dépaysé
(French)
Feeling lost, like a fish out of water
Sir John Seeley was a Victorian historian who famously observed that the British, in establishing their empire, seemed ‘to have conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind’. If that’s true, then the English-speaking world is composed largely of the descendants of stout-hearted adventurers who sailed round the globe seizing territory without even noticing it. Not, then, people who are happiest in their own back garden and feel uneasy anywhere that you need a passport to get to.
And yet, if you search for a word in English to describe the feeling of not knowing quite where you are, not feeling at home, not recognizing your surroundings, you would probably come up with ‘disoriented’. ‘Bewildered’ or ‘confused’ might do instead, or maybe ‘befuddled’. All of which suggest an uncomfortable, nervous feeling.
You might think the language that contains these words is one spoken by people who would rather be safe at home, thank you very much, sitting by the fire in that comfy old cardigan with the holes in the elbows, watching Strictly Come Dancing while clutching a nice warm cup of hot chocolate – certainly not by the bold and buccaneering descendants of Francis Drake, Captain Cook, or the heroes of the East India Company.
The French have a similar expression, dépaysé (deh-pay-SAY), which also means lost, or like a fish out of water. Pays means country, so the word literally means ‘taken out of your country’. But here is the unexpected and, for an English speaker, slightly shaming part: dépaysé also has the meaning of feeling disoriented but loving every minute of it. If you are dépaysé by a holiday, for instance, it has brought you a change of scenery, reinvigorated you and given you a new lease of life. While the poor old English speaker is still blinking around anxiously for something familiar, like a child looking for his teddy bear, the Frenchman is breathing in the air of freedom, gazing out impatiently at fresh new pastures and relishing the mystery of what might lie over the horizon.
The excitement of renewal, the relishing of fresh experiences, the idea of a new beginning?
And it goes further than that. The verb se dépayser (suh DEH-pay-say) literally means ‘to exile yourself, to remove yourself from your own country’, but it also has the sense of stepping outside yourself, looking at your surroundings with fresh eyes. It’s a positive view of unfamiliarity, an acceptance of the fact that living exclusively with what you’re used to can have the effect of dulling your senses and quenching your ambitions. There’s a similar verb in French, se débrouiller (suh day-BROO-i-yay), which has a literal meaning of de-fogging yourself, shaking off the mental baggage that you carry with you and making a new start.
Should we embrace a word to describe a feeling that is shared with the whole of humanity – the excitement of renewal, the relishing of fresh experiences, the idea of a new beginning? Or are we the sort of people who take Marmite and marmalade on holiday with us and want English pubs and fish and chips on the Costa Brava – people who have no time for these fancy foreign ideas?
The Great Outdoors
Komorebi
(Japanese)
The magical atmosphere created by sunlight filtering through leaves
It’s a spectacle that’s hard to forget.
The Canal du Midi, cutting through 150 miles of southern France and linking the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean, is an engineering wonder of the seventeenth century. Its creator, Pierre-Paul Riquet, kept around twelve thousand workers on the job with picks and shovels for fifteen years. But it’s not the history, or the technological marvels, or even the human triumphs that remain with the traveller – just the staggering, overwhelming beauty of the place.
Sailing through it, the water ahead of the boat is glassy-still, so the reflection of the weathered old stone bridge forms a complete circle, in which it is hard to see where the stone ends and the water begins. The boat noses softly through this magic circle to the other side as if it were a scene from Alice Through the Looking Glass. And the silent lines of plane trees, planted for the practical purpose of holding the soil of the banks together, filter the harsh southern sun into a stippled, shivering carpet of light and shadow.
It is one of the most beautiful sights many visitors have ever seen. And there is a Japanese word that describes it exactly.
Komorebi (KOH-MOH-REHB-i) is made up of a group of characters which individually signify trees, escape and sunlight, and it’s usually translated – or rather described – as sunlight filtering through the leaves. For a simple translation we might try dappled shade, but once you’ve seen this particular light, you’ll realize how inadequate that is.
For a start, it looks at that magical, shimmering atmosphere from a slightly pedestrian angle – at the shade rather than at the light. And, even worse, it concentrates on the pattern on the ground rather than on the quality of the light itself. The Japanese, on the other hand, see the shafts of sunlight shifting and dancing as the leaves move – light escaping from the trees, as the word puts it. Komorebi is neither light nor shade, neither sky nor earth, neither movement nor stillness, but the delicate interplay between all of them.
That awareness of light and its subtle creation of atmosphere is a quintessential aspect of the appreciation of nature among the Japanese. A Japanese garden will be a flickering patchwork of light and shade, not just a collection of neatly labelled plants. Komorebi provides a gentle, understated hint of the characteristic way in which the Japanese see the beauty of the world about them.
But it’s not only the light, the shifting colours and the delicacy of the scene that komorebi celebrates, it’s also a beauty of almost unimaginable fragility. The smallest cloud across the sun, a wind any stronger than a light breeze that moves the branches about too violently, and it vanishes as if it had never been there.
And, in that sense, the word applies exactly to the beauty of the Canal du Midi, too. For all Riquet’s engineering genius, the canal has proved to be fragile. Along great stretches of the banks, the plane trees that helped to produce that shimmering light are gone, cut down to try to protect the rest from the ravages of an infectious, incurable fungus. Rough-cut stumps line the water’s edge like rotten teeth, and the harsh sun beats down without any trembling leaves to lessen its glare. All that is left is the memory of komorebi.
Dreich
(Scots)
Endlessly wet and dreary weather
Scotland has provided many valued benefits to the world, ranging from porridge to penicillin, Scotch whisky to the steam engine, tarmac to the telephone. Given that the wettest place in the whole of Europe is Scotland’s western Highlands, it is not surprising that they have also given us the most memorable and evocative word to describe persistently dull, wet, cold, dreary and unforgiving weather.
Dreich (DREECH, with the final ch pronounced as in loch) is an ancient word. Scandinavian in origin, it originally meant tedious or protracted, like a job that drags on and on, a book that doesn’t know when to end, or a long and boring sermon. The novelist and poet George Macdonald referred in the late nineteenth century to ‘The kirk, whan the minister’s dreich and dry.’[13] He was a minister himself, so he presumably knew what he was talking about. This sense of delay, or an unwillingness to get to a conclusion, led to another phrase, dreich in drawin’, which could be applied to someone who seemed to be taking an unreasonable time to make a decision – a suitor, in particular, who showed no sign of wanting to get married.
That meaning of apparent endlessness is still there in the word dreich when it is used about the weather – the thing about a dreich day, apart from the cold, the sunlessness and the miserable, soaking drizzle, is that it seems as if it’s never going to end. To call it particularly Scottish weather might be a gross libel on a country which, whatever the statistics say, has palm trees growing on the Ayrshire coast, but it remains a favourite word for Scottish poets describing the place where they live. Alexander Gray, for instance, in his poem ‘December Gloaming’,[14] writes movingly of the gloominess of the shortening days as the year draws to a close and the cold dreich winter days when night is falling at four in the afternoon. And a recent poll to establish the Scottish nation’s favourite home-grown word resulted in a runaway victory for dreich, with nearly a quarter of the total votes cast.
What makes it especially attractive is its onomatopoeic quality – its long-drawn-out vowel sound, followed by the back-of-the-throat ch, as in loch or Auchtermuchty, seems to echo a yeeuch of disgust and resignation – two words which, in regard to the weather at least, demonstrate how much the Scots and English have in common. And yet dreich was lost to standard English centuries ago. That’s odd, given that one of the distinguishing traits of the Anglo-Saxon peoples is their ability to talk so long, so passionately and so tediously about the weather. Maybe it’s because the English, unlike the more realistic Scots, tend to cling even on the dullest days to an unreasonably optimistic belief that there is a tiny patch of blue sky and it’ll brighten up yet.
It seems as if it’s never going to end.
Perhaps dreich is a word that Scots can safely use about Scotland, but the English had better not. And to tread even more dangerous territory as to whether dreich might relate to anything deeply rooted in the Scottish character is a subject for a braver book than this one. However, it’s worth remembering P. G. Wodehouse’s assertion that ‘It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.’[15]