The Greeks Had a Word For It Read online

  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.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Matters of the Heart

  Sticks and Stones …

  Elusive Emotions

  The Great Outdoors

  Cultural Connotations

  Nuts and Bolts

  Only Human After All

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  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 thi
s 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.