The British government of 1940, like their Serbian counterparts nearly sixty years later, knew how effective inat could be at improving morale among a battered and frightened population. The thing about hard drugs, whether fed from a syringe or from a politician speaking over the radio, is that they may be dangerous when abused but they are very effective indeed when the patient is in real and mortal danger.
Muruwah
(Arabic)
Selfless generosity associated with manliness
WILFRED THESIGER, THE great Arabian traveller of the twentieth century, was constantly astounded by the generosity of the tribesmen who were his hosts and guides on his journeys across the Arabian Desert. Theirs, he said many years after his travels were over, was the only society in which he had found true nobility.
But one incident above all gave him an insight into the traditional values by which the Arabs set such store. He and his companions were joined at their camp one night by a skinny old man in a tattered and grubby loincloth, who sat down to eat with them. Thesiger was astonished at the warmth of the welcome extended to the old man by the tribesmen.
He was, one of his guides explained, a man who was known far and wide for his generosity. Thesiger was not surprised by much about the Arabs, but he looked at the old man quizzically – the bones visible beneath the skin on his half-starved body, the broken sheath of his old dagger, the clear signs of grinding poverty – and he wondered what on earth the man could have to be generous with.
His companion shook his head. This, he explained, had once been the richest man of his tribe, but now his goats and his camels were gone. He had nothing. What had happened, asked Thesiger, still not understanding. Disease? Raiders? No, came the reply. He had given them all away, killing his last animals to feed strangers he had met in the desert. He was ruined by his own generosity.
‘By God, he is generous,’ the tribesman said with envy in his voice, and Thesiger finally understood.
The quality the old man possessed was muruwah. It is usually translated as ‘manliness’ – a term with all sorts of cultural connotations. For us, manliness might imply a collection of adjectives such as virile, strong, vigorous and hardy, but for the Arabs, scraping a meagre living in harsh and ever-threatening conditions, it carried those meanings and far more besides. It celebrated the virtues of the desert – courage, patience and endurance – and an acceptance that the individual would sacrifice his own interests for those of the community as a whole. There was an unquestioning loyalty to the sheikh and the elders of the tribe: to ensure survival, muruwah (moo-ROO-ah, where the first is as in book, the second as in cool) had to be essentially a communal rather than an individual virtue.
It could be brutal – within the tribe, it led to an implacable adherence to traditional eye-for-an-eye justice. If a member of the tribe killed a man’s camel, then his own camel would be forfeit; in a society without locks, the few possessions the tribesmen owned had to be protected with an iron law. And it went further: if someone killed a man’s son, then his own child would be put to death as well. Towards those outside the tribe, it would mean at the very best a guarded hostility: muruwah meant that the tribesman would be ready to avenge any insult or aggression from another tribe with immediate armed retaliation.
But it embraced, too, a wholehearted generosity – a quality that was needed where there was never enough of anything. Providing food and shelter for the stranger was a matter of honour for the tribe and the individual alike; there was an instinctive egalitarianism that meant that the old, the young and the sick would be protected for as long as they could be without endangering the survival of the tribe as a whole.
An acceptance that the individual would sacrifice his own interests for those of the community as a whole.
For centuries, muruwah was the only way to maintain some sort of social order among the chaos of warring tribes. It was a chivalric code of honour that dated back well before the time of Mohammed and the dawn of Islam, and, as Thesiger found, it lasted well into the twentieth century.
Taken away from its birthplace, perhaps the complexity of qualities that muruwah entailed is less easy to understand – in the Arabian desert, shortage of food meant that you starved, while for most people in today’s developed world it probably means that you’ve forgotten to go to the supermarket.
But not for everyone. Even in today’s wealthy countries within Europe and in the US there are people without enough to eat, and across the wider world the problem of hunger and famine is always with us. If we had a word for manliness that included an idea of generosity and social responsibility it might just encourage us to act accordingly.
Philotimo
(Greek)
The love of honour
WE ALL LIKE to feel special – even unique. Jews are the Chosen People; Britain (or maybe England, or possibly the United Kingdom – the details are a little vague) is the Mother of the Free, whom God made mighty and whose bounds shall be set ‘wider still and wider’; the United States of America is the Land of Opportunity. And philotimo is the unique birthright of the Greeks.
Philotimo (fill-oh-TEEM-oh) means, literally, ‘the love of honour’ – to which rather grandiose phrase William Shakespeare’s Falstaff might unheroically reply, ‘What is honour? A word. What is in that word honour? What is that honour? Air.’22 Those lines might not go down too well in Greece, as philotimo is a quality that many Greeks might say lies at the heart of who they are.
Thales of Miletus, one of the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece, observed in the early sixth century BC that philotimo came naturally to the Greeks. It was, he said, like breathing. ‘A Greek is not a Greek without it. He might as well not be alive.’ It is a quality that the Greeks frequently claim even today – a way of identifying their modern way of life with the glories of Classical Greece. And it is a mistake to be too cynical about it – philotimo is the quality that is often ascribed to the Greek partisans of the Second World War who risked the firing squad to help Allied servicemen and to join the resistance against the Nazi occupation. For them, it was much more than a fine word. The reply to Falstaff might be that honour, in their case, involved personal pride, honesty, courage and a passionate sense of freedom coupled with a deeply felt patriotism.
Philotimo is a quality that many Greeks might say lies at the heart of who they are.
But these qualities, central to philotimo, don’t tell the whole story. Over the centuries, it has come to represent a number of virtues that are seen as typically Greek – not just generosity but also appreciation of the generosity of others; not just love for your family but delight in their love for you; not just freedom but a sense of the limits placed on your freedom by your own instinct for what is right. In particular, it involves an understanding of the right way to behave in your relationships with others, whether within your own family or in wider society. Philotimo brings together the private individual and the public man.
The trouble is that these virtues, which describe the qualities that make an ideal man or woman, are universal – there can be few nations in the world that have not, at some time or other, claimed them as their own. In his first letter to the Thessalonians, the people of Thessalonica, St Paul urged them to live their lives with philotimo – a message that was passed on through the Bible to all the people of Christendom. The Greeks may not have a monopoly on the virtues, but they do have the only word to describe them. We can’t all be Greeks, but we can all achieve philotimo.
NUTS AND BOLTS
Fartlek
(Swedish)
Alternating fast and slow running
IT’S NOT MUCH of a secret. Inside each one of us, hidden deep in the recesses of our inner psyche, is an eight-year-old child trying to get out. He or she isn’t altogether happy with all that adult stuff, like jobs, ambition and politics, which seems to fill so much of our lives. What this inner child likes is fun, laughter, chocolate biscuits and an occasional guilty snigger at something that seems rather harmlessly
grubby.
Every now and then, that inner eight-year-old needs to be let out to play. And this is where the Swedish word fartlek (FART-laik) comes in. It literally means ‘speed-play’ and describes a type of athletics training devised in the 1930s in which periods of fast and slow running are intermingled. It doesn’t take much to imagine organized lines of unsmiling, blond-bearded Swedish athletes conscientiously counting their paces as they jog and then sprint and then jog again up and down snow-covered Swedish mountains with unpronounceable names, but it’s those first four letters that give fartlek its shame-faced appeal in English.
It’s a word that can’t be spoken without giving that inner eight-year-old, who is generally kept so carefully hidden, the opportunity for a vulgar snigger. But there’s more to fartlek than that. Words remind us of our history – the k and the gh in knight are distant echoes of the Anglo-Saxon pronunciation, and the Hindi roots of bungalow are a memory of the British Raj in India. Similarly, fartlek invokes the past in a very direct way, taking us a great deal further back than the memory of our eight-year-old selves. If the fart part gives us a cheap laugh, the lek part carries a hidden reminder to English speakers of their Norse heritage.
Lek survives – just – in Yorkshire dialect, where it means play, just as it does in Swedish. It has survived from the Old Norse of the Vikings for more than a thousand years, lurking on the borders of English ever since the raiders swarmed ashore, raping and pillaging and spreading carnage and chaos across the land. If we were ever to allow the little twist of Viking DNA that’s buried in our genome to clap on its horned helmet, grab its battleaxe and rampage through our quiet streets, we would end up at the very least in the magistrates’ court. We’re not going to seize a bullock from a field and carry it off to roast over an open fire, washed down with flagons of fiery alcohol drunk from a human skull. We’re not going to leap out of the car and hack down the traffic lights that seem to have been holding us up for ever. We’re not going to fly with whirling axe and savage war cry at the annoying little man who tells us to keep off the grass. But it’s good to be reminded by that one little word that those things are there in our DNA, just waiting to be let out. We could if we wanted to.
A case might be made for adopting fartlek into English because it could be useful to have a word that describes a mixture of running and walking – hurrying for a bus, for instance, when you’re not fit enough to sprint all the way to the bus stop, and, anyway, you’re carrying heavy shopping. But the real reason is much simpler. It reminds us, in two very different ways, of who we used to be.
Desenrascanço
(Portuguese)
To solve a practical problem using only the materials to hand
IT’S PROBABLY ONE of the most important skills a person can learn and yet there is no satisfactory word for it in English.
The Portuguese speak of desenrascanço (d’AYS-en-ras-CAN-sauo), which literally means ‘disentanglement’ but is used to describe the ability to put together a last-minute, emergency solution to a problem by using the materials that happen to be available. It may not last, you may well not be using the various component parts of the solution in accordance with the manufacturers’ instructions, and don’t even mention health and safety, but whatever idea it is that you’ve cobbled together will at least get you home. Probably.
You are driving home late at night, and you hear an ominous metallic crash from the back of the car, immediately followed by a scraping sound, possibly with a glimpse of sparks flying up off the road flashing into your rear-view mirror. The exhaust pipe that you have been meaning to fix for weeks has finally come adrift, and you are stranded.
If you are the sort of English speaker who lives life according to a series of instructions, such as ‘Be Prepared’ or ‘Fail to prepare, prepare to fail’, rather than the concept of desenrascanço, then this doesn’t apply to you. You will have had the exhaust fixed in the first place, or at the very least you will have had the foresight to pack a complete tool kit, together with a pair of overalls, safely in the back of the car. If, on the other hand, you are like most people, you will call out a breakdown service and sit for an hour and a half in the cold while they try to find you.
But if you are Portuguese, you will take off your leather belt, wrap it around the exhaust pipe and fiddle it through the exhaust bracket or some other convenient part of the underside of your car. As you drive home, you can mentally pat yourself on the back and ponder on the meaning of desenrascanço.
It’s not limited to cars. Desenrascanço can be applied to problems with your computer, with household equipment, gardening tools or anything else that can go wrong. You can use it to recover lost keys from a drain or replace vital items of equipment. Some people might even try it, optimistically, when attempting to save faltering relationships.
It involves inventiveness, imagination and flexibility, as well as the sort of confidence that believes there is no practical problem in the word that cannot be solved with a wire coat hanger, a piece of string, a little bit of sticky tape and a lot of ingenuity. An unwillingness to spend money is also an advantage – one thing that skilled practitioners of desenrascanço have in common is an expression of horrified disbelief when they see the price of manufacturers’ spare parts or skilled repairmen.
There is, however, a significant disadvantage to the whole idea. If you are less than proficient in the necessary skill, or a little clumsy with your hands, your repair will go wrong and some smart Alec will tell you that whatever it is you’ve been fixing is farpotshket (see here). You will then end up having to pay someone to do the job properly, and it will cost you much more time and money than if you’d got help in the first place. Sound familiar?
Lagom
(Swedish)
Not too much or too little, but just the right amount
IN RECENT BRITISH politics, one phrase has been overused to such an extent that people have started to scream in anger at the television screen or the radio, perhaps even the printed page, whenever they hear it.
It doesn’t matter which political party is speaking. Every revamped policy, every change in taxation rates, every new benefit proposal, every fresh idea, has been aimed at the ‘hard-working family’. It seems to have been generally agreed among political speechwriters that everyone who is anyone wants to work hard to get ahead and achieve a better life for their family. Americans, in the same way, never tire of telling you that anyone, however poor their birth, can achieve staggering, limitless, mind-blowing wealth. Yachts, mansions, private jets, swimming pools and an annual income equivalent to the GDP of a medium-sized nation – they are all up for grabs, with a bit of hard work. That, they insist, is not a myth but the American Dream.
It’s very likely that most Swedes wouldn’t understand. Like everyone else, they see the virtue of hard work and appreciate the benefits of ambition, but the Swedes also see that scrabbling as fast as you can for money and advancement has a downside. Not only are you likely to trample on other people as you elbow your way up, you also tend to miss out on a lot of things like time with your family, relationships, reading a book or just sitting smelling the flowers. The word that most Swedes would choose to sum up their attitude to life would be lagom (la-GOHM).
Lagom is used to express satisfaction, and if you ask a group of Swedes for a word that encapsulates the essence of living in Sweden, that’s the one they would probably choose. It means just right, not too much or too little – but without the rather grudging air of ‘satisfactory’ or ‘sufficient’ in English. How are you? Lagom. Is your coffee hot enough? Lagom. How’s the weather? Lagom. Someone’s height may be lagom, so may the number of people at a party.
It’s a positive word, and many Swedes would extend its use from the expression of satisfaction with the amount of food on their plate to describing the nature of Sweden’s politics. It’s a social democratic, middle-of-the-road country where taxes are high and people might find it hard to get rich, but where everyone is looked after a
nd life is … well, lagom. It means equality and fairness: there is enough for everyone.
Work–life balance is important to the Swedes. Whereas in the City of London or on Wall Street, burned-out executives are reputed to leave jackets over their chairs when they stagger home after a sixteen-hour day so that people will think they’ve just slipped out for a moment and are still working at their desks, in Stockholm that would simply cause bemusement. If you have to work such long hours, it means that you’ve planned your work badly, they would think. Your career, too, should be lagom.
Clearly they’re doing something right, because Sweden always figures at or around the top of the league tables that are produced periodically, setting out the countries where people are happiest and most content. And in London, too, perhaps there seems to be a shift of emphasis away from chasing the last commission and towards aiming to be home in time to put the children to bed. Younger people are less ready to sell themselves body and soul to the company in the way that their parents’ generation did.
So maybe lagom is a word that the English language is waiting for. Would it be a good thing to have it in the dictionary? Well, not too good, not too bad. Just lagom.
Epibreren
(Dutch)
Unspecified activities which give the appearance of being busy and important in the workplace
TECHNOLOGY, AS WE all know, makes simple things more complicated.
In big bureaucracies like the Civil Service, the EU or the BBC, all you once needed to get to the top were brackets after your job title and a clipboard – the brackets to prove you were important, and the clipboard to prove you were busy.
The Greeks Had a Word For It Page 8