Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, invented the term ‘portmanteau word’ to describe the idea of two meanings packed into a single word, like the two halves of a large suitcase. To carry on the metaphor, shemo is not even a word in its own right but deserves to be thought of as a whole matched set of luggage. It is a triumph of compression.
English speakers are unlikely to get their tongues round the complexities of shemomechama – and, incidentally, if you think that Georgian is hard to pronounce, you should see the script. (The Romans, who knew a thing or two about empires and foreign cultures, wrote the language off as incomprehensible.) But with due apologies for butchering their language, we might borrow the prefix and use it on its own, to mean ‘I didn’t meant to, but somehow it just happened …’ – whatever ‘it’ might be.
‘Did you realize that you were doing 40 mph in a 30 mph zone, madam?’ And the reply is a guilty shake of the head and a muttered, ‘Shemo.’
‘You said you were going to be home by seven, and it’s nearly three in the morning!’ How did that happen? ‘Shemo.’
Tartle
(Scots)
Social faux pas of forgetting the name of the person you’re introducing
NO DOUBT SOMEONE, somewhere, thought years ago that they were doing the world a favour when they invented the name badge that people could wear at conferences or parties. Not only will it simplify introductions, they must have thought, it will also save the embarrassment of forgetting somebody’s name.
The problem is that the people most likely to forget names are those who are middle-aged or more, and they are also the most likely to be short-sighted. The embarrassment caused by having to lean forwards and peer at a woman’s chest, in particular, is far worse than an honest admission that you’ve forgotten her name. Better by far, the Scots might say, to tartle (TAR-tll).
Tartle originally meant to hesitate nervously, whether in meeting someone, failing to reach a business deal, or simply backing away from anything unusual, as a horse might. From that, it has developed to refer specifically to that horrifying moment when you are halfway through an introduction and forget the name of the person you are introducing. Perhaps you may remember only their first name, perhaps only their second, perhaps only a nickname, but whichever it is you are caught with a stupid smile on your face and nothing coming out of your mouth except a stream of unedifying ers and umms. You are tartling.
The word can be either a verb – ‘I was just introducing her when I tartled’ – or a noun – ‘Please forgive my tartle.’ Either way, it’s a light-hearted and jovial way of describing an excruciating social moment.
If we are going to incorporate tartle into the English language, there’s no reason why we should restrict the definition to the specific meaning that the Scots have given it. As we get older, many of us succumb to what we like to call ‘senior moments’ – we start to talk about a certain film star, singer or politician and find halfway through the sentence that we’ve forgotten their name. We say, incautiously, that there are three reasons for something and then start to list them – knowing, deep down in our soul, that after the second one our mind will go blank. We go into a room and then stand there bemused for a few seconds while we try to remember what we came in for.
All of these moments are different forms of tartles. If we could name them with a word a little more dignified than the twee ‘senior moment’, perhaps we would find them easier to face. If you’re under thirty and can’t see why on earth we would need a word like tartle, just wait a few years.
Amae
(Japanese)
Behaving in an endearingly helpless way that encourages other people to want to take care of you
SO YOU’RE IN your thirties – successful and making a name for yourself in your career. People at work want to know your opinion. When you say something, they listen. You are a pretty big cheese, although you would never say so yourself.
But when you travel home to see your parents, you expect the special dinner you always enjoyed as a child – and you’ll let your mother see how disappointed you are if it’s not on the table. You want to sleep in your own room, where the books that saw you through adolescence are still on the shelves. If you think you can get away with it, perhaps you’ll take your washing home – and of course you can get away with it because your mother will not only wash it but also iron it, fold it and put it carefully back in your overnight bag for you.
You are suffering from a serious dose of amae.
Amae (ahm-EYE) is a Japanese word popularized by the psychoanalyst Takeo Doi in his book The Anatomy of Dependence, which was published in Japan in the 1970s. It describes a type of behaviour which he claimed was particularly prevalent among the Japanese but which many Westerners will recognize in their friends. Some may also see it in themselves and feel a little embarrassed about it, but it’s a word that’s normally applied to other people. It refers to a tendency to curry favour or induce affection by behaving in a way that encourages other people to take care of you, and its commonest form is to continue to act like a child in dealings with your parents. Such as demanding your special meal or taking your washing home.
The parent–child relationship is for many people a model for the way they behave throughout their lives, but it’s not the only place where amae shows itself. There are all sorts of ways in which people carry out amae in their working lives and in their wider personal relations. Usually it appears in a relationship between someone junior and someone senior in the workplace, or between someone younger and someone older in a social setting.
But that’s not always the case. Often, it shows itself in a claimed weakness or incapacity – the woman who ‘can’t’ change a wheel on her car and waits helplessly for some man to step forward and do it for her; the man who holds up his crumpled shirt with what he hopes is an appealing smile and simpers to the woman in his life that he ‘doesn’t know how’ to use an iron. It’s not just that they want the job done but also that they want to be loved for their helplessness. They are the walking, talking human manifestation of the famous heart-rending, head-on-one-side, big-eyed gaze of an Andrex puppy – and often they make you want to give them a good, hard kick.
But that’s a very negative view, and there is a positive side to amae, too, especially as practised in Japan. Doi’s theory was that Japanese society never completely abandons the dependent phase of childhood, so that amae is reflected in the strictly hierarchical structure of many companies. It may take longer to establish a close business relationship, but once it’s achieved it’s likely to be marked by trust on both sides and a sense of personal responsibility. And it’s not just a one-way relationship.
The junior Japanese executive may profit from the advice and experience of his senior, while the older exec enjoys the respect and deference he receives and feels he deserves; the young woman in her car has her wheel changed for her, and the man who does it gets an agreeable if rather patronizing feeling of superiority.
The young woman visiting her parents, meanwhile, gets a tasty meal and a bag of freshly laundered washing. But if she steps too far out of line and demands too much, she’s not too old to end up on the naughty step.
Iktsuarpok
(Inuit)
The anxious and irresistible need to check whether who, or what, you’re waiting for has arrived yet
IT CAN MANIFEST itself in different ways.
Perhaps it’s waiting for a girlfriend to arrive – just aching to see her, anticipating the arrival of the person who might turn out to be the love of your life and turn your world upside down. You start glancing at the clock about an hour before the time you’ve arranged. Then you check that everything is ready – that the table is laid or the glasses are out ready to pour your first drink. And then – still ages before she is due – you peep out of the window to see if she might have arrived early. And finally you actually go outside and peer up the road to see if she is on her way.
Or perhaps, more pros
aically, it’s standing in a bus shelter, craning your neck for the umpteenth time to see if the bus has turned the corner yet.
It’s not only about anxiety – you can feel the same mounting tension even if you know for certain that the person is going to come or if you haven’t got an urgent appointment that you’re going to miss if the bus is late. There’s a positive feeling of excited anticipation – you want the excitement of seeing whatever it is you’re waiting for as soon as you possibly can. Even so, you’ll only be absolutely certain they haven’t let you down once you see the person in the flesh or the bus in the road, so the little niggle of unease is there.
Whether it’s a bus or the love of your life, it doesn’t make sense – when they get here you’ll know, and they won’t arrive any more quickly because you keep leaping out of your chair or peering anxiously down the road. But you just can’t help yourself.
The Inuit of northern Canada have a word for it – iktsuarpok (ITT-suar-POHK) – which catches precisely that excitement and the physical activity that goes with it. It’s usually translated as ‘the feeling of anticipation when you’re expecting a visitor’, but, crucially, it also contains the sense that you try to ease the tension by getting up and going out to see if they are coming.
You want the excitement of seeing whatever it is you’re waiting for as soon as you possibly can.
It could also cover those secret glances at the telephone when you’re expecting a call, or the surreptitious checking of your email or Twitter feed to see if anyone has tried to contact you.
It’s surreptitious because you know, deep down inside, that it’s a sign of weakness, but it’s an appealing sort of weakness. It’s the opposite of composed self-possession – an involuntary admission of a lack of confidence. While we’re encouraged to strive to be the sort of person who breezes through life brimming with self-belief and with no thought for the possibility of failure or rejection, few of us really buy into it. So to see someone acknowledge, even with a silent downward glance at a mobile phone, that they’re anxious for something to happen and worried that it might not is to realize that we’re not alone in the world.
Fremdschämen
(German)
The empathy felt when someone else makes a complete fool of himself
Pena Ajena
(Spanish)
Myötähäpeä
(Finnish)
ASK SOMEONE FOR an example of a foreign word that can’t be translated into English and they’re most likely to come up with the German Schadenfreude (SHAH-den-froy-duh), which means the guilty thrill of pleasure felt when someone else comes a cropper. Think Laurel and Hardy and a custard pie or, for a more scholarly approach, you could refer to the Summa Theologica of the thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian St Thomas Aquinas on the eagerly anticipated delights of heaven: ‘That the saints may enjoy their beatitude more thoroughly, and give more abundant thanks for it to God, a perfect sight of the punishment of the damned is granted them.’
So, among the other joys of Paradise, one might experience an eternity of heavenly Schadenfreude while gazing down on the suffering, tortured souls below. There’s something horribly smug about the idea, but it’s a word that has been picked up from the German and is quite commonly used in English, so it’s clear we recognize the feeling.
A 2013 academic study in the United States concluded that taking pleasure in this way from other people’s misfortunes or failures is a ‘normal’ human response, but that doesn’t necessarily make it one we should be proud of.23 Importantly, it’s not the only response possible when we see someone making a fool of themselves.
Imagine that you are at a wedding reception and the best man rises to make his speech. You realize first from the way that he is holding on to the table for support, and then from the slight slurring of his words, that he has been a bit too free with the beers, the wine and the champagne. And then he starts to speak. It is a car crash in slow motion. The jokes would have been too vulgar even for the stag night, and here the bride’s parents and her elderly relatives are starting to shift uneasily in their chairs. The bride is looking distinctly unhappy, and the groom has his head in his hands. But the best man is oblivious and ploughs drunkenly on …
Well, you might feel a sneaking sense of malicious delight in his predicament – Schadenfreude. But you might also, in a more sympathetic spirit, shudder with embarrassment on his behalf. If the words we use reflect the emotions that we feel, it’s rather worrying that we have one to describe that first unworthy feeling but nothing for the more generous response.
And yet Schadenfreude does have a more charitable opposite in German. Fremdschämen (FREMT-shah-mun) literally means ‘foreign-shame’, and it describes the feeling of being embarrassed on someone else’s behalf – that ‘No, don’t do it!’ feeling that you have as your drunken friend staggers to his feet. In fact, it needn’t be someone that you know, and they may not even be aware of how they are letting themselves down, but you can still feel your toes start to curl in vicarious embarrassment.
The fact that we use the one German word and not the other suggests that English speakers are a peculiarly unsympathetic lot. Other European languages have their own words for the feeling: in Spanish it’s pena ajena (PEH-nah ackh-EYN-ah, where the ckh is pronounced at the back of the throat, like the Scottish loch); vergonha alheia (ver-GOHN-ya’al-EY-ya) in Portuguese; myötähäpeä (my-ER-ta-HAP-ey-a) in Finnish. They all mean more or less the same thing. Plaatsvervangende schaamte (PLAHTS-ver-VONG-EN-duh-SHAHM-tuh) in Dutch probably has the most helpful literal translation – ‘place-exchanging shame’. While in English, all we can do is shudder with embarrassment and wish for the ground to swallow us up.
To be fair, Fremdschämen only appeared in the German language within the last ten years, so the Germans aren’t that far ahead of us, but it still means that the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Finns and the Dutch are apparently instinctively more generous and sympathetic than English speakers. Here, then, is a word to help us express our better selves.
T’aarof
(Farsi)
The gentle verbal ping-pong between two people who both insist on paying and won’t back down
PICTURE THE SCENE. Two friends are in a cafe, ordering at the counter and looking forward to a catch-up over some caffeine.
‘That’ll be £4.40, please,’ says the extortionist barista.
One of the friends dives into her purse to find some cash, which she attempts to hand over. The trouble is that the other friend is unwittingly schooled in t’aarof, and she holds out some cash, too. The result is that these two women, both of them with impeccable manners, squabble like schoolgirls, pushing each other’s hands aside over who is going to pay for both of them.
These ‘No, let me’ arguments over dinner bills, or rounds of drinks, or cinema tickets can be painful, and there is an alternative. You want to pay? Fine, you pay, and next time it will be my turn. It will all even up in the end, for God’s sake. But that’s the view of someone with no concept of t’aarof.
T’aarof (TAA-ruf) is the Farsi word for a system of etiquette that is central to social life in Iran. It involves an assumption of deference, with each party to a discussion insisting that the other is more worthy of consideration. So the most casual visitor to an Iranian home will be offered tea, or perhaps a piece of fruit, or a sweetmeat with yogurt or honey. By the rules of t’aarof, he will decline, and the host will repeat the offer more urgently. This can go on through several exchanges, just like the two women fighting over coffee, until one or the other weakens. (If you’re supposed to be trying to turn down the sweetmeats, it’s as well to make sure that you’re the one who weakens. They’re delicious.)
To outsiders – particularly Americans, who generally pride themselves on saying what they mean and meaning what they say – this can be confusing, but behind the courteous fencing is a genuine confusion that has to be eradicated. The host wants, above all, to be welcoming, and so offers the refreshment h
owever inconvenient it may be. The guest, in turn, might like the drink or the food but, more than that, doesn’t want to inconvenience his host. And so the exchange starts, with each side looking for clues about what the other is really thinking.
The principle extends throughout various situations. If a guest compliments his host on any of his possessions – a piece of glassware or a picture – he may well be offered it as a gift, and the same dizzying circle of refusal and increasingly pressing offer will begin. A shopkeeper may insist that the item to be bought is really worthless, whereupon a sort of reverse haggling starts, with the purchaser insisting on its value and the shopkeeper talking it down; a group of businessmen may refuse to answer a question until it is clear which one is the most senior and he has given his opinion.
Visitors to Iran are sometimes warned that the expectation is that they should refuse any offer three times, but in reality t’aarof is less prescriptive and more subtle than this. Deep down, it’s about each party to the discussion wanting to show respect to the other. It’s a phenomenon that’s familiar enough in the English-speaking world and one which we ought to learn to deal with rather than squirm over. Perhaps if we had a word for it – like t’aarof – we might manage the embarrassment of it a little better.
Kummerspeck
(German)
The weight gained through overeating when grief-stricken
The Greeks Had a Word For It Page 10
