The Greeks Had a Word For It

by Andrew Taylor

  OCCASIONALLY, POLITICIANS HAVE to make sacrifices for their country – perhaps even put themselves through near-torture in the interests of diplomacy. In the 1980s, it was Margaret Thatcher’s turn.

  The Prime Minister was visiting the then German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, at his home near Ludwigshafen on the Rhine. National leaders always like to show off the culinary delicacies of their own country, and so Kohl invited her to lunch at a local tavern – not an environment in which the Iron Lady was at her most comfortable. Her idea of a good lunch was a nice piece of delicately grilled Dover sole, and she visibly blanched as her plate was piled high with Saumagen – stuffed pig’s stomach – with mounds of sauerkraut and potatoes to go with it. She did her best but was still picking rather primly at it as Chancellor Kohl, who was known to be a monumental trencherman, returned for his second helping. And then his third. Mrs Thatcher survived the experience with her dignity and her good humour intact – just.

  The point is that, fairly or unfairly, the Germans have a reputation for being expansive about their food and drink. The British are known for their love of beer, but a nation that consumes its lager from one-litre steins is never likely to come second in a drinking contest. And German cookery, as Mr Kohl demonstrated, is better known for the generosity of its portions than for the delicacy of its preparation.

  The Germans – at least according to reputation – have never needed an excuse to grow large and imposing. Again, Chancellor Kohl might be quoted as an example. So why does a nation like that need a word like Kummerspeck?

  Kummerspeck (KOOM-ar-shpek, with the oo as in book) is the Germans’ ideal excuse for putting on unwanted weight. It means literally ‘grief-bacon’, and it refers to the extra weight gained as a result of overeating through grief. The ‘bacon’ part of the word (speck) doesn’t refer to the crispy slices of heaven that go with eggs for breakfast but to the unmovable deposits of fat that build up relentlessly under your skin. But it is the ‘grief’ part – kummer – that is the masterpiece of the word as an excuse.

  Kummer means grief, sadness or general sorrow. You have only to say it and you have disarmed criticism at once – what sort of person is going to make someone who has just told them that they are grief-stricken, sorrowful and world-weary feel even worse by telling them they’re getting fat?

  Kummerspeck acknowledges the fact that among the most popular items of self-medication for sadness and distress are tubs of ice cream, chocolate brownies and chips, and draws attention to their fairly obvious side effects. But why does a nation like Germany, whose recipe books and restaurants suggest that they need no excuses for eating and drinking with more enthusiasm than wisdom, need an excuse anyway?

  Well, so much for national stereotypes. The statistics tell a different story. They show that if anyone needs an excuse for piling on weight it’s the British. English speakers in Europe – the UK and Ireland – occupy two of the top three places in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s European league table of obesity, with only Hungary above. The Germans, for all their pigs’ trotters and apple strudels and immense steins of lager, are a svelte and highly respectable seventeenth.

  Given it’s the Brits who are guilty of shovelling in the fish and chips, double-size burgers and cream cakes, we do need an excuse for such poor eating habits, and kummerspeck could be the one. We should be thankful to the Germans for providing us with the word and take it to our hearts – where those fatty deposits are busy constricting our arteries – at once.

  Jayus

  (Indonesian)

  A joke so unfunny you have to laugh

  WHEN YOUR CHILDREN are small, you want to make them laugh and be happy, and so you tell them jokes – simple jokes, the sort they’ll understand, with puns and pratfalls and probably a few rude noises as well. They will want to please you in return, in the way that children do, and so, even though they haven’t had the chance yet to learn what sort of things really are funny, they laugh.

  And so you believe that you have told them a funny joke and go on to repeat the performance, again and again. That loud click you may or may not hear at around this point is the sound of the trap snapping shut: you are now telling Dad-jokes, and the habit will enslave you. Since parents never notice their children growing up, you will probably continue to do it, if they let you, well into their teens and possibly beyond. Finally, you will be telling Grandad-jokes, from which sad fate there is definitely no escape.

  The Indonesians clearly understand this predicament, since they have a word to describe both the joke and the person who tells it – jayus (jie-OOS). It’s a joke that simply isn’t funny and neither is the person who tells it – a joke, in fact, that fails so completely that the hearer has to laugh because it is so bad.

  It doesn’t apply only to men or fathers. Teachers are another group particularly prone to jayus. It’s a word that belongs originally to the informal language of Indonesia, bahasa gaul, which is generally used in day-to-day conversation and in popular newspapers and magazines, and so it’s a way to deflate authority or pomposity.

  It’s more than just a bad or a lame joke. It may be the quality of the telling that makes a jayus rather than the story itself, but the laughter that it causes comes in relief that the performance is over, in surprise that anyone could tell such a bad joke, or in mockery of the poor sap who has tried so hard and so ineffectually to be funny.

  It’s certainly not polite, sympathetic laughter, to make the joke-teller feel better, because that would be a deliberate and purposeful decision, and the response to a jayus is as instinctive and irresistible as a genuine belly laugh. In fact, just like the self-deluding, joke-telling dad, the jayus may take the laughter at face value and continue to believe that he is a natural-born comedian.

  And that, of course, is a joke in itself – just not the one he thought he was telling. The joker has become the joke, which, for all the pleasure it may give his listeners, is not a place anyone would like to be. But there are worse things to be than a jayus. A world that contains Dad-jokes also contains Dad-dancing. And no language on earth, thank God, has a word for that.

  Guddle & Bourach

  (Scots)

  A bit of a mess that can be sorted out & a hideous mess that is almost irreparable

  BACK IN 2007, the Scottish National Party came to power in Edinburgh after an election that had been beset by problems and controversy. In fact, commented the BBC’s Scottish political editor, Brian Taylor, it had been a ‘voting guddle’ (GUDD-ull). But it was worse than that, he went on: ‘The authorities are saying: (1) we couldn’t get all the ballot papers out; (2) they were so complex, people couldn’t fill them in; (3) when they finally filled them in, we couldn’t count the blasted things! There’s a splendid Gaelic word, bourach. It means an utter, hideous mess. This is bourach, Mach Five.’24

  In fact, bourach (BOO-rackh, where the ckh is pronounced at the back of the throat, as in loch) has several meanings, all of them coming from the original sense of a pile or a heap. The Lanarkshire poet John Black, in his collection Melodies and Memories, wrote in 1909 of tea parties with ‘Bourachs big o’ cake and bun, to grace the feasts an’ spice the fun.’ It also came to mean a cluster or a small group of people, birds or animals, and at the same time a small hut, particularly one used by children to play in – presumably because such a rough hut might well look like a pile of stones.

  But it’s in the sense of a mess or a state of confusion that it’s mostly used today, and the comparison with guddle helps to define both words. Guddle was originally a verb, which meant to grope around uncertainly under water and, more particularly, to try to catch a fish with your bare hands. From that sense of blind uncertainty, it gained the meaning that it has today. It has an attractive sound, but we have any number of words already that mean much the same thing – think of muddle, mess or jumble.

  So a bourach is like a guddle, only more so.

  Either one is a splendidly evocative word for a whole
variety of confusions, from the organizational shambles of the Scottish election to the normal state of a teenager’s bedroom, to the chaos that follows the start of roadworks on a busy street. The difference is that a guddle is a bit of a tangle that can be sorted with some patience and application, whereas a bourach is the sort of rats’ nest of chaos that makes you want to throw your hands in the air and give up.

  So, while a guddle is often something that has simply happened – nobody’s fault, just an example of how things can go wrong – a bourach is often the result of someone’s good intentions going awry. You can make a bourach of a place or of a job, but either way it’s going to be the sort of experience that you won’t forget in a hurry. Suppose, for instance, that you are baking a cake. The kitchen can often get in a bit of a guddle, particularly if you don’t put things away and wash up as you go. You’ll have a lot of tidying up and clearing to do once the cake’s in the oven, but with a bit of work everything will be fine by the time it’s cooked.

  But now add in a four-year-old child who’s desperate to help. Not only will they keep getting extra plates and cake tins out of the cupboard in case you need them, they’ll also want to sift the flour for you and end up getting it all over the floor, the curtains and probably themselves. They may decide, while your back is turned, that what the cake really needs is a sprinkling of chocolate chips, but in reaching to take them down from the shelf, they’ll spill most of them and eat the rest. Half a pound of sugar will vanish down the back of a cupboard, and along the way a whole bottle of milk will be spilt, two eggs will be dropped on the floor and three of your favourite dishes will end up in pieces. Between you, you will have made a complete bourach of the kitchen.

  And then, when you forget to take the cake out of the oven, you’ll have made a bourach of that as well.

  Schnapsidee

  (German)

  An off-the-wall idea that comes from a drinking session

  GOOD IDEAS DON’T just come from nowhere. We all need something to spark the imagination, to get our thoughts running, and sometimes that something is a couple of drinks. Alcohol can set off all sorts of ideas, but most of them aren’t good at all. Making decisions after a late-night session is seldom a sensible plan. Most of the inspiration that comes out of the neck of a bottle would have been better left deeply buried in your subconscious.

  The Germans have a word for the sort of idea that results – a schnapsidee (SHNAPS-i-day) is, literally, a ‘booze-idea’, and it’s used to describe a suggestion that is seen as completely impractical. Schnaps is the German for spirits or strong liquor, but the word is used even when there’s no implication that the person putting forward the idea has been drinking. A young child could have a schnapsidee, or a teetotal church minister.

  The point about a schnapsidee that English finds it impossible to get across in phrases such as ‘hare-brained plan’ or even ‘midsummer madness’ – which are a couple of translations that are sometimes suggested – is that it’s not just a bad idea, it’s an idea so ridiculous that you cannot have been thinking straight when you came up with it. It’s thoughtlessly, self-indulgently stupid.

  But that makes it sound like a very solemn, judgemental term, which it’s not. Schnapsidee is generally used about less consequential ideas rather than serious issues. You might say that swimming in a river on Christmas Day is a schnapsidee, but a German wouldn’t have used the word – even if he’d dared to – to tell Hitler what he thought of his idea of marching to Moscow.

  However, it has just the degree of surprised incredulity that we sometimes want to express about grandiose political programmes: ‘I just can’t believe anyone could ever have thought that was a good idea!’ It could apply on all sides of political divides. Calling a strike? Schnapsidee. Sending the police or the army to break a strike? Schnapsidee. Leave the European Union (or join the European Union)? Schnapsidee.

  At the risk of getting into the dangerous area of national stereotypes, are the Germans maybe given to working things out in detail, planning, dotting every i and crossing every t? If so, perhaps that’s why they’ve won the football World Cup four times, but it might also explain why they have such a downer on off-the-wall ideas that come out of a bottle of booze.

  If we’re going to steal someone else’s word and make it our own, we should take the chance to be really radical. While most ideas that come with the tang of alcohol on them would be better quietly forgotten, there are some that fly – some that come from a place deep inside us, where we have no inhibitions, where we have ideas that fizz and change the world. If a drink or two can unlock the door to that place, then we shouldn’t be so keen to write off the schnapsidee.

  Imagine a Spanish merchant in the mid-fifteenth century sharing a glass of wine on the waterfront at Palos de la Frontera with a sea captain in his forties – not a young man in those days. ‘OK, Columbus, so you’re planning a trip to the Indies … but you want to sail which way?’ And off he wanders, shaking his head at the madness of the fool he’s just been talking to, the schnapsidee of it all – never guessing that a new world lies somewhere over the horizon and that the ‘fool’ will soon be walking on its beaches.

  Why shouldn’t we use schnapsidee to mean an idea that seems to be wild and crazy, and leave open the possibility that it just might be a flash of the purest brilliance?

  Here’s to the schnapsidee!

  Notes

  1 Françoise Sagan, La Chamade, tr. Robert Westhoff (London: Penguin Books, 1968).

  2 This unsourced story, which Dumas is said to have enjoyed, appears in several collections of anecdotes from the nineteenth century onwards.

  3 A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad (1896) in A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems, ed. Nick Laird (London: Penguin Classics, 2010).

  4 E. V. Lucas, The Life of Charles Lamb (London: G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1905).

  5 Boris Zhitkov, Što ja vídel or What I Saw, ed. Richard L. Leed and Lora Paperno (Indiana University: Slavica Publishers, 1988).

  6 Tsurezuregusa or Essays in Idleness, tr. Donald Keene (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

  7 A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad (1896) in A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems, ed. Nick Laird (London: Penguin Classics, 2010).

  8 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800, in Lyrical Ballads, ed. Michael Mason (London: Routledge, Longman Annotated English Poets, 2007).

  9 Federico García Lorca, ‘Play and Theory of the Duende’, published in Lorca – In Search of Duende, tr. Christopher Maurer (Paris: New Directions, 1998).

  10 Nick Cave, The Secret Life of the Love Song, published in The Complete Lyrics 1978–2007 (London: Penguin, 2007).

  11 Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (New York: Knopf, 1980).

  12 Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, Dadirri: A Reflection (http://nextwave.org.au/wp-content/uploads/Dadirri-Inner-Deep-Listening-M-R-Ungunmerr-Bauman-Refl.pdf).

  13 George Macdonald, ‘What the Auld Fowk are Thinkin” in The Poetical Works of George Macdonald (Gloucester: Dodo Press, 2007).

  14 Alexander Gray, ‘December Gloaming’ in Gossip – A Book of New Poems (Edinburgh: Porpoise Press, 1928).

  15 P. G. Wodehouse, Blandings Castle (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1935).

  16 William Morris, Hopes and Fears for Art (London: Ellis and White, 1882).

  17 William Wordsworth, ‘To the Cuckoo’, in Lyrical Ballads, ed. Michael Mason (London: Routledge, Longman Annotated English Poets, 2007).

  18 John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, in John Keats: The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (London: Penguin Classics, 1977).

  19 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, tr. Richard Crawley (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7142/7142-h/7142-h.htm).

  20 Archbishop Desmond Tutu, ‘Semester at Sea’ lecture, 2007, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZHx9DJR-M).

  21 Speech at Memorial Service for Nelson Mandela (Johannesburg, 2013).

  22 William Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 1, Act V, Scene i.

  23 Professor S
usan Fiske and Mina Cikara, ‘Their pain, our pleasure: stereotype content and schadenfreude’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 1299, September 2013.

  24 Brian Taylor, report on Holyrood election 2007 http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/election07/scotland/2007/05/ah_bourach.html).

  Acknowledgements

  I’ve gone to many native speakers of different languages for help with writing this book, and also to scholars who have spent years gaining a deep understanding of a language that fascinates them. What they’ve all had in common is their enthusiasm – people want to share things that they find special about a language that they love.

  There are too many to list them all, but I owe particular thanks to Bariya Ataya, Tamsin Craig, Elsa Davies, Eva Dingwall, Irakli Gabriadze, Orit Gadiesh, Quinten Gueurs, Ricky Lacey, Professor Vali Lalioti, Nino Madghachian, Professor Mark Riley, Wendy Robbins, Pat Roberts and Georgi Vardeli.

  My agent, James Wills, and my editor, Andrea Henry, have given me the benefit of their valuable professional help; and I’ve enjoyed working on this book even more because from the start I’ve shared it, like everything else, with my wife Penny.

  And finally, Dr Tim Littlewood and the NHS team in the Department of Haematology at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital. There really isn’t a word in any language to express what you feel when people save your life.

  About the Author

  Andrew Taylor is a linguist of questionable skill, who speaks enough French to make the French sneer at him, enough Arabic to make Arabs laugh at him, and enough Spanish to order a cup of coffee and have a hope of getting, if not necessarily what he asked for, at least a hot drink of some kind. He can ask for milk in Russian, and if he asks for directions in the street, he will understand the answer if it means ‘Straight on.’ He is better at English, in which he has written ten books, including biographies and books on language, history and poetry, and he has a lot of friends who speak a wide variety of languages and who have helped him with this book.