The Greeks Had a Word For It Page 6
Put like that, hozh’q sounds like an ideal philosophy and a sobering corrective to today’s grab-and-go lifestyle, but it is hard to imagine many takers for it in the modern world. So is it possible to have a little hozh’q in your life? Is it something you can train yourself to develop in your character, like patience or tolerance, or is it an all-or-nothing concept, like virginity?
The Navajo might say the latter, but if we could borrow the concept along with the word, I can’t see why it shouldn’t become a part of our daily lives. When people retire from their day job, they often adopt a whole different range of priorities. Getting and having becomes a lot less important than seeing, hearing, doing and enjoying. But most of us don’t think about beauty that often. The concept of hozh’q might remind us that there’s more out there than just the things we own and the contents of our bank accounts.
Gökotta
(Swedish)
An early-morning excursion to enjoy the start of a new day
IT HAS TO be one of the best things in the world. It’s early morning and for most people the day hasn’t even started. A new sun is rising and you can feel the air getting warmer by the minute, perhaps there’s dew on the grass, and all around you is the sound of birdsong. Not just the birds but the whole world is waking up.
In Sweden, they call that trip out into the early morning gökotta (yer-KOHT-ta). The word means literally ‘early-morning cuckoo’, and it strictly refers to such a trip taken specifically on Ascension Day, some six weeks after Easter. Traditionally, it’s a time for early-morning picnics in a clearing in the forest, in the hope of hearing the cuckoo, which usually arrives back in Sweden from its winter migration sometime during May. The direction from which you hear its call and the number of times that you hear it are supposed to mean good or back luck.
But the Swedes love the countryside in all its manifestations, whether it’s the wilderness, the crashing rivers and the mountain peaks of the north, the rolling countryside and endless beaches of the south, or the forests that cover two-thirds of the country. It’s no surprise that a tradition like this, which celebrates the accessibility and friendliness of nature, should have spread to cover any early-morning excursion, at any time of the year.
In English, we might extend the meaning of the word even further, to cover any trip out which involves getting up early and going outside to enjoy the start of the day and the sounds that it brings. The cuckoo has always been special in England just as in Sweden, because of its shyness, its distinctive call and the regularity with which it arrives and departs with the spring and early summer. Two hundred years ago, William Wordsworth wrote about it:
Oh blithe newcomer! I have heard,
I hear thee and rejoice.
Oh cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird,
Or but a wandering Voice?17
Our love of this seasonal visitor goes back for centuries. But perhaps you don’t need the cuckoo for a gökotta, though if you’re lucky enough to hear one, it’s a real bonus. Out in the countryside, there are still plenty of songbirds to reward you with the different sounds of their various calls, and there is still the unmistakable sense of a new day starting and the world coming to life.
We could go still further in redefining gökotta: not many countries, after all, are as rural as Sweden, and many people in the English-speaking world would find it impossible to reach a secluded forest glen early in the morning. So why not enjoy a gökotta in a town or city, just to celebrate a spring morning? The distinctive birdsong and sounds of nature won’t be there – although some of the parks in London or other big cities might provide something close – but there are other sounds and experiences that are peculiar to early morning in an urban environment.
A new day starting and the world coming to life.
The rattle of shutters going up as shops start opening for business, the scrape and thud of boxes being moved inside off the pavement, the shuffle of half-asleep feet and the thunder of an early-morning bus aren’t quite the traditional sounds of a Swedish gökotta, but there would still be the warmth of the sun and the sense of the world starting up afresh. Spring is the spring, sunshine is sunshine, and early morning is early morning wherever you are. What’s not to like?
CULTURAL CONNOTATIONS
Nemawashi
(Japanese)
Behind-the-scenes networking to get everyone onside, particularly ahead of a business meeting
FOR CENTURIES, THE Japanese have created gardens – stylized, formal and traditional oases of calm – to encourage contemplation, provide refuge from a busy life, or simply as places where they could stroll and enjoy the peaceful sounds of running water and the breeze in the trees. They have, along the way, perfected the art of bonsai, the delicate cultivation of miniature trees that goes back for at least fifteen hundred years.
Both these skills demand patience, forethought, careful planning and, crucially, the development of specific techniques to achieve the result the designer wishes. Such a technique is nemawashi.
Nemawashi (neh-MAOU-a-shi) means, literally, ‘going around the roots’ and refers to the painstaking process by which a tree is prepared to be transplanted into the place that has been assigned to it in the overall design. The roots will be exposed one by one and carefully prepared for the trauma of being dug up and moved, so that the whole tree remains healthy and vigorous in its new location.
In its modern sense, nemawashi describes the equally delicate and important process of getting ready for a meeting. Using the same image we could say, rather more prosaically, that it’s the process of ‘preparing the ground’. But the Japanese go about it in a much more determined and systematic way.
There will be one-to-one talks with people who are to be present, so that their support can be guaranteed and their ideas incorporated into the proposal. Senior members of the management team will expect to be informed and consulted in advance, and small groups from the whole decision-making team may be set up to hold preparatory discussions. The key to all these activities is their informality, before the all-important full meeting. It’s all about sharing information, reaching a consensus and at all costs avoiding argument and public loss of face.
It’s a search for new insights, new ways of refining and improving the proposal.
It also widens the pool of people whose opinions and contributions are sought. In the Toyota Production System, devised by the car-making giant as a consistent and efficient process to be followed in all their factories, nemawashi is seen as the first step in reaching any important decision. It often involves consulting all the employees about a new plan, from shop floor to boardroom, and aiming, in theory at least, at a company-wide consensus.
The expectation is that before anyone brings a proposal to a formal meeting, they will have carried out nemawashi to get a wide range of views about it and understand the problem from as many viewpoints as possible. But it is more than just a one-off event, a preparation for a specific meeting. It’s built into the whole way of working, from top to bottom, of a Japanese company.
For example, a detailed study of the way a production line in a factory works may reveal a small change that could be made to improve efficiency, but before the team who carried out the research make their formal proposal, they will take the idea to the shop-floor workers who run the line, to the fork-lift drivers who move products from place to place, and to the supervisors who have day-to-day control of the whole process. Management will still make the ultimate decision but in the knowledge that everyone involved will have had a chance to fine-tune the idea.
It involves sharing, not owning, ideas at the very earliest stage. It’s a search for new insights, new ways of refining and improving the proposal.
Would simply adopting the word lead to a more inclusive, more consultative style of management in companies in the English-speaking world? Might it help the search for improved productivity in British industry? Those would be big claims for a single word. But the best reason for incorporating nema
washi into English is simply because of where it comes from. It’s a word that takes a centuries-old technique from the peaceful and relaxed world of oriental gardening and applies it to the hectic modern world of industry and manufacturing. Now that’s a good idea.
Andrapodismos
(Ancient Greek)
Brutal, systematic murder with no pretence otherwise
THE ANCIENT GREEKS gave us democracy, and philosophy, and drama, and mathematics, and the Olympic Games. They were, we’ve been told, a gentle, thoughtful and literate people who laid the foundations of Western civilization, engaging in deep intellectual and artistic conversation as they strolled around the agora in the centre of Athens.
If they needed any help with their public relations in a later, busier and noisier age, they could have called on John Keats in the nineteenth century, with his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, the ‘still unravish’d bride of quietness’.
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ he said, as he gazed in wonder at the handiwork of the Ancient Greek artist, ‘that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’18 And we finish the poem in a warm, comforting glow, thinking fondly of the sensitive race of men who inspired such moving thoughts.
Well, yes. But the Ancient Greeks also gave us andrapodismos (AND-ra-pod-IS-mos). It’s a word they used to describe what they did sometimes when they conquered a city – killing all the men and selling the women and children into slavery. They weren’t always quite as gentle and cerebral as we like to think.
If you wanted to translate the word into English, then ‘ethnic cleansing’ might be as good a phrase as any with which to start. But andrapodismos is more specific and also less coy. Whereas the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ hides its brutality behind words that might almost suggest a harmless clean-up operation with mops and buckets, andrapodismos is quite clear about what it means. It makes, to use an unfortunate phrase, no bones about its murderous intent.
The historian Thucydides describes a warning in 416BC from the Athenians to the island of Melos in the Cyclades, which had challenged their authority. ‘The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,’ they told them – and then proceeded to prove it with an andrapodismos. Grown men were put to death and women and children sold as slaves, and, a little later, five hundred Athenian colonists arrived to seize the island for themselves.19 The Melians should have known better: a few years before, Athens had done much the same to the people of Skione, and the Spartans carried out an andrapodismos at the city of Plataea. Philosophical and artistic they may have been, but the Greeks could be as brutal and bloody as any soldier in any war.
Luckily, we don’t often need a word to describe such cold-blooded savagery. We know mass murder when we read about it and, God forbid, see it. And yet it’s still one that would be worth its place in the dictionary, if only because of what it reminds us about the Ancient Greeks and the way we often think about them. This is not to say that they were worse than us – and names like Srebrenica, Rwanda, Islamic State and Cambodia should stifle any tendency towards that sort of complacency – but it does suggest something that we should have known all along. Perhaps they were no better, either.
We often like to believe things that we know aren’t true – standing in a crowded bus or on the Underground with our faces pressed lovingly into a stranger’s armpit, we might entertain wistful thoughts about what a happy life our forefathers must have enjoyed. In the sunny, unstressed, rural days before the industrial revolution, we dream, how they must have relished the summer sun as they worked in the fields by day, sleeping the sleep of the just by night. And then we remember what a cruel life of unrelieved poverty and hard work it must really have been.
It’s easy to forget that humans are complicated creatures and always have been – that those we admire and respect are seldom angels and those we hate are less than the devil. Maybe ‘an andrapodismos moment’ would be a good phrase to describe those occasions when our fantasies bump up inconveniently and painfully against the truth.
Honne & Tatemae
(Japanese)
A person’s private and public faces – how we really feel, and the mask we show to the world
ENGLISH LIKES TO think of itself as a bluff, honest, John Bull of a language that says what it means and means what it says. Words that suggest that we may tell lies or misrepresent ourselves – ‘hypocritical’, for instance, ‘insincere’, ‘double-dealing’ or ‘duplicitous’ – all leave a sour taste in the mouth. Who wants to be thought a hypocrite?
And yet it doesn’t always reflect the way that we behave. We all occasionally sacrifice the harsh truth in favour of the kinder, gentler, or just the easier thing to say.
Pollsters’ surveys report that voters want one thing – high public spending, perhaps, even with the taxes to pay for it – but they regularly go into the privacy of the polling booth to vote for something completely different. Honesty and straightforwardness sound a much less attractive option to the man faced with the classic question, ‘Does my bum look big in this?’ ‘Delicious,’ we will say to a waiter, before smuggling pieces of inedible gristle into a paper napkin to slip into our pockets.
We have no word to suggest that there may be perfectly honourable reasons for being less than completely truthful – privacy perhaps, or a sense of decency, or an unwillingness to cause hurt. Kindness is a virtue just as much as honesty.
Japanese is possibly the only language with words to describe such behaviour. Honne (HON-NEH) is the way you really feel, the thoughts and feelings that you will only express to your closest confidants. For everyone else, there is tatemae (tat-eh-MY-eh), the face that we show to the public – respectable, polite, cool and revealing nothing about our true feelings. The Japanese business contact to whom you explain your proposals may nod and smile and say ‘Hai, hai,’ – but whatever the Japanese phrasebook may say, the words do not really mean ‘Yes, yes.’ They mean simply, ‘I hear you.’
‘We must do lunch,’ they may say, brightly, without intending any such thing.
Honne is to be kept carefully guarded. It might include your deepest dreams and wishes, your personal opinions and, crucially, your real emotions. It would take a long time and a lot of building of trust before foreigners – gaijin or gaikokujin, which literally means ‘outsider people’ – would be likely to share honne.
Learning to understand this difference between honne and tatemae, to adjust your speech to fit the person you are talking to, is one of the key lessons of social etiquette for Japanese children. The distinction runs through Japanese society, from the behaviour of politicians and government officials to relations between business contacts to daily social interactions.
It’s important, too, to recognize how you are being spoken to. An invitation for a meal, for instance, might be tatemae, a purely formal mark of courtesy that is not meant to be taken up. English speakers do much the same thing – ‘We must do lunch,’ they may say, brightly, without intending any such thing – but they have no word to describe what they are doing. It’s not about being deceitful but about not wanting to give offence.
Politeness and courtesy are built into Japanese society, and the distinction between honne and tatemae is also a virtue in its own right. One of the teachings of Confucius is that neither happiness nor anger should be apparent in one’s face, and a traditional Japanese would consider it a shameful breach of good manners to express his true feelings or intentions directly. Such behaviour might be described as baka shoujiki, or honesty to the point of foolishness, and it would be seen as naive, impolite and childish.
So the Japanese, having understood and codified behaviour that the languages of the rest of the world seem to prefer to ignore, must presumably be relaxed and at ease with themselves? Sadly, no. Some social commentators agonize over fears that the rest of the world sees them as dishonest or insincere. So, as foreign travel grows more popular and Western influences increase, Japan might begin to move away from the twin concepts of honne and t
atemae. Yet while English speakers value politeness, gentleness and consideration for other people’s feelings just as much as the Japanese, perhaps what’s needed is not for Japan to abandon the words but for them to be adopted into English to describe a practice for which we need feel no embarrassment.
Ubuntu
(Bantu)
The quality of being a decent human being in relation to others and therefore of benefit to society as a whole
THE MUSIC OF Beethoven, the poetry of Shakespeare, the paintings of Van Gogh – it seems somehow wrong to think of them as German, English or Dutch. They belong to all of us because they remind us what we are all, as human beings, capable of at the very summit of our potential. And the same is true of the southern African Bantu word ubuntu (u-BUN-tu, where the u sounds are rounded like a Yorkshireman asking for ‘some butter’).
Translated literally, it means the quality of being human – humanity, if you like. But that goes almost nowhere towards explaining the ramifications of what has grown into a cross between a world view, a moral aspiration and a political philosophy in southern Africa. And even that leaves out most of the associations that have grown around the word from the principles of the anti-apartheid movement and the achievements of Nelson Mandela.
When Mandela tried to explain the concept of ubuntu, he used a memory from his childhood of how a traveller reaching a village would never have to ask for food, shelter and entertainment. The villagers would come out and greet him and welcome him as one of them. That, said Mandela, was one aspect of ubuntu. It didn’t mean, he went on, that people should not make the most of their own lives and enrich themselves – the important thing was that they should do so in order to enable the community as a whole to improve.