The brackets were the most important part of your official role. If you were a simple News Editor at the BBC, you were expected to perform some comparatively menial task such as editing news. If your title was Editor (News), then the brackets told the world that you were a person of substance, who would be involved in strategic blue-sky thinking, analysis and inter-departmental relations, rather than actually doing anything. You would no more dream of editing news than you would of washing up the coffee cups. You have to be important before you can be successful.
But even though you avoided doing anything, you had to look busy. You had to give the appearance of being proactive and decisive as you strode confidently down the corridor from the morning medium-term forward planning symposium to the Performance Analysis Unit. Nothing was better for that than being armed with a clipboard. You could stop and make notes on it occasionally, but the clipboard itself would do the trick.
But now clipboards belong in a museum. They’ve been replaced by tablet computers and smart phones – and since everyone has those, and no one can tell whether you are devising strategically vital spreadsheets on them or checking your Facebook page, they’re no use at all for making you look important.
What you need these days is epibreren.
But even though you avoided doing anything, you had to look busy.
Epibreren (ep-i-BREER-un) is a Dutch word originally coined by the newspaper columnist Simon Carmiggelt, and it means – well, it means nothing at all. That is the beauty of it. Carmiggelt claimed in one of his columns that the word had been revealed to him in 1953 by a civil servant from whom he had requested some papers. The papers, said the civil servant, still needed epibreren. Intrigued, Carmiggelt asked what epibreren meant, and the civil servant eventually confessed that it had no meaning. It was a word he had made up to fend off enquiries.
The story is almost certainly just that – a story. Carmiggelt was a talented columnist with a column to fill. But the word epibreren survived and has come to refer to unspecified activities that sound as though they might be important but don’t actually amount to anything. In short, it’s a catch-all excuse for inaction, laziness or inefficiency, which also manages to make the speaker sound rather grand. The theory is that people never like to admit that they don’t understand what someone has said, so if the excuse is given with sufficient confidence and in crisp efficient tones which suggest that the speaker has very important things that he or she has to be getting on with, it’s likely to be accepted. But it’s more than just an excuse – not only does it fob off enquiries, it also makes you look like a person of stature, someone at the top of the food chain. It’s the verbal equivalent of the once-ubiquitous clipboard.
We’re much less subtle in English. Our excuses, such as ‘The cheque is in the post’ or ‘My computer has gone down’, are so crude that they generally aren’t even meant to be believed. ‘The dog ate my homework.’ The problem with them is they indicate an acceptance that something is wrong, even though they pass the blame on to someone or something else. The beauty of epibreren is that it reflects the fault back on to the complainer – ‘Can’t you understand how important this is?’ it seems to say. ‘How could you be so inconsiderate as to waste my valuable time with these petty questions?’ It has just the sort of empty, airy superiority that a senior executive needs.
Perhaps we could adapt the word to describe all vacuous attempts to avoid responsibility? Who knows, in a few years’ time, most big bureaucracies could even have a Department of Epibreren. And the head of department will be referred to as Senior Executive (Epibreren) – don’t forget those brackets.
Poronkusema
(Finnish)
An old unit of measurement equivalent to the distance travelled by a reindeer before needing to urinate
IF YOU HAVE any idea what a rod, pole or perch is, the chances are that you are English and over fifty years of age. If you’re a little younger – especially if you are interested in horse racing – you might do better with a furlong, while a cricketer might be able to advise you about a chain. And most people could probably manage to describe an acre, even though they might not be too sure how big it was.
They’re all old units of measurement that date back to the centuries before anyone thought of measuring how far it is from the equator to the North Pole, dividing the answer by ten million and calling the result a metre. They belong to an older, slower and less accurate age when measurements related to the way that people lived their lives, rather than to abstract calculations performed in laboratories by scientists in white coats. They all go back to the mediaeval ploughman driving his oxen over the field.
The team was expected to plod on ploughing its furrow until it had to rest – a distance that was reckoned to be about 220 yards (just over 200 metres) and which therefore became known as a furrowlong, or furlong. The stick with which the ploughman controlled the oxen had to be five and a half yards long (just over five metres) to reach the front pair – one rod long. Put four of those rods end to end and you reach the width of the area that the team aimed to plough in a day. That distance became known as a chain in the seventeenth century, when surveyors started to use chains as the most accurate way to measure it, and survives as the length of a cricket pitch. Multiply the length of a furrow (220 yards) by a chain (22 yards), and you have an acre (4,840 square yards), the area a team was expected to plough in day. Do the maths and marvel.
It all sounds complicated and slightly arbitrary today, but it wouldn’t have done in the times when men went out to plough the fields every day. Then, the units would have chimed with the way they lived their lives. And the same was true for the herdsmen who drove reindeer across the wastes of northern Finland. Their unit of measurement was even more down to earth.
A poronkusema (por-on-koo-SAY-mah) was the distance that a reindeer was believed to be capable of travelling without stopping for a pee. If you’re interested – and if you were herding the animals, you would be – it’s about 7.5 kilometres. It was in official use as a measurement of distance until metrication in the late nineteenth century.
It’s unlikely, in the twenty-first century, we’re ever going to need to know the distance that we can drive a reindeer along a motorway until we need a reindeer service station. The poronkusema is obsolete in more ways than one. But perhaps it’s worth a new lease of life as a way of describing something like a typewriter or those dusty antique farm-workers’ tools that you sometimes see hanging on the walls of country pubs – something that is old and outdated, it’s true, but which reminds us nostalgically of past times.
Farpotshket
(Yiddish)
Irreparable damage to something caused by a botched attempt to mend it
IT MAY SEEM hard for anyone under fifty to believe, but there was a day when an ordinary person could open the bonnet of a car and have at least a sporting chance of understanding what they found there. They could fiddle with the engine, tweak it a bit, even fix it when it went wrong. Not today, of course – everything is governed by a computer that can only be reset by a piece of equipment that costs a fortune and needs a graduate in electronic engineering to make it work.
You could drive a car on which the clutch linkage was made out of a twisted wire coat hanger, or use a pair of tights as a fan belt (while hoping your mother didn’t miss them). You might even have broken an egg into the radiator in an attempt to fix a water leak. But those are far-off golden days, when the summers were warmer and the chocolate bars bigger and tastier. And the memories of how we used to raise the car’s bonnet and work magic with the engine are a little rose-tinted, too.
The description that comes to mind for these attempted running repairs is not do-it-yourself wizard or ad hoc genius but farpotshket.
Try as you might to pretend differently, not only did these fixes not work (except for the coat hanger and the clutch – that modification could be carried out by an expert and the car would work for years), they ended in disaster. Farpotshket (f
ahr-POTS-SKEHT) is a Yiddish word which describes something that is irreparably damaged as a result of ham-fisted attempts to mend it.
It’s the second part of that definition that makes the word such a delight. It’s not just that it doesn’t work – that would be bad enough but easily described with the American military acronym SNAFU (Situation Normal: All – umm – Fouled Up). The point about something being farpotshket is that you messed it up yourself, or you trusted someone else to do it and they messed it up for you. There is something hair-tearingly infuriating about it – the word carries with it just an echo of the superior sniggering of the experts who could have done it all so much better, if only you’d paid them. But more than anything, it comes with the resigned shrugged shoulder of a person who knows that he should have known better. It was never going to work.
It has an associated verb that is almost as expressive – potshky (POTs-ski) is to fiddle with something in a well-meaning and purposeful way but with a complete lack of competence. You can potshky with anything – cars and other machines, of course, but also with intangible things like diary arrangements, things you have written, or even relationships. What they have in common is that once you have potshky-ed with them, they will collapse in disarray. And it will all be your own fault.
Cars, computers, electronic devices – the relevance of farpotshket to daily life today is obvious. ‘It looks simple enough – that little wire seems to have come adrift. If I just connect it there …’ BANG! And then you call the helpline and a concerned voice on the other side of the world says, ‘Well, as long as you didn’t … Oh, that is what you did. Well, it’s farpotshket then.’ Or at least they would if we could say that in English.
Tassa
(Swedish)
A silent, cautious, prowling walk – like that of a cat
CATS, FOR ALL the pictures on the Internet showing them looking cute with ribbons around their necks and peering winningly over the edge of a cardboard box, are carefully designed killing machines. The merciless green eyes give nothing away; the claws that can rip off a mouse’s head with a single flick are delicately sheathed out of sight in those silky soft paws; and the creature proceeds stealthily, one foot placed precisely in front of another, as it makes its silky, sinuous way towards its prey.
It’s a way of moving that we sometimes try to emulate, perhaps in order to avoid waking someone up or disturbing them while they are concentrating or listening to music. Perhaps, if we are of a particularly infantile turn of mind, we simply want to creep up behind them and say ‘Boo’.
We might tiptoe, but we might also put our heel to the ground first and then carefully roll down the outside of our foot until our weight is on the ball of the foot, walking silently like a moccasin-clad Native American making his way through the forest. And the reason that this way of walking has to be so carefully described is that we simply don’t have a word for it.
Or at least we do, but we use it differently – ‘pussyfooting’ would be an ideal word to describe walking like a cat, but we’ve invested that with its own incongruous meaning. You can’t imagine a cat ‘pussyfooting’ around its prey. Delicate and infinitely cautious they may be, but when they are hunting they move straight towards their dinner.
The Swedes have a much better word. Tass (TASS) is an animal’s paw and tassa (tas-SAH) is the verb meaning to walk silently and delicately, like an animal. It is quite distinct from either ‘tiptoe’ or ‘pad’ – the two words in English that might be used most commonly to translate it. Tiptoeing, by contrast, sounds crude and clunky. The noun ‘pad’ – meaning the sole of an animal’s foot, which we turn into a verb in order to say ‘padding around’ – has none of the sense of silence, caution and deliberation that tassa carries with it. It’s partly the sound of the word – that double-s in the middle has the effect of a finger to the lips and a quiet ‘sshhh!’
But it’s not only about silence – it’s about control. When a cat puts its foot to the ground, it instinctively checks the firmness beneath before it transfers its weight. It could, if it needed to, lift the foot again without losing its balance. Only the muscles needed for movement are under any tension – the rest of the animal’s body is relaxed and at ease. There is a subtle muscular control that, for a human, would be almost reminiscent of the flowing Chinese martial art of tai chi. Tassa is to move like that – silently, with liquid grace and total control.
It’s never going to be a common word – it has a specialized and very precise meaning. Tassa is not the way we move around every day. It is never going to be used to describe how we walk to the pub or carry the rubbish out to the bins. But as we creep upstairs late at night, or try not to wake the baby, or avoid disturbing the teenager at her homework, tassa is the word that should be on our mind.
Tsundoku
(Japanese)
A pile of books waiting to be read
BOOK LOVERS ALL have the same guilty secret. And they all dread the same question when people see their collection of books.
‘So have you read them all?’
It’s a perfectly civil question and quite flattering, since it suggests that all the information, knowledge and wisdom distilled in the pages on your shelves might just be replicated in your brain, but it makes most booklovers quail. Because the honest answer, for most of us, is ‘No’.
How can you explain about the book that you bought when you were passionately interested in a particular subject, only to find when you got it home that it was as dull as last month’s newspaper? Or the ones that you snapped up on a whim in the bookshop because their covers looked so appealing? Or the ones – a growing number as you get older – that you might possibly have read years ago, if only you could now remember the tiniest hint of what they contain. Or the ones you were given as presents, which you never much liked from the moment you opened the parcel. When the excuses run out, the answer is the same.
There are books on our shelves that we haven’t read.
We will read them one day, we tell ourselves with the best of intentions, and so we keep them in convenient piles around the room or next to our bed. When we have time, we say, or we promise ourselves a few days off, or we keep a pile ready for our summer holiday and another for when we wake in the night. But somehow, inexplicably, the piles just keep growing.
This practice, as the Japanese will tell you, is tsundoku (TSOON-do-coo). It literally means ‘reading pile’, but it’s used to describe the act of piling up books and leaving them unread around your house. To those not infected with the book-collecting bug, the tottering and apparently random piles may seem to be nothing but an unsightly mess, but the dedicated practitioner of tsundoku will know where each book is as clearly as if they were catalogued by computer.
You could expand the word’s meaning to cover any of the pleasant actions that we mean to take one day – the visits to old friends, the things we’re going to buy, the holidays in exotic countries. They’re not something to beat ourselves up about, because piling up treats to fill the future is one of the best things about being alive. There is no shame in those piles of books that you will read – perhaps – when you have the chance.
If we had no tsundoku in our lives, it would indeed be a bleak and cheerless world.
ONLY HUMAN AFTER ALL
Shemomechama
(Georgian)
The embarrassing sudden realization that, somehow, you’ve eaten it all …
IN ENGLISH, WE have words and we put them together to form a sentence. There can be very short sentences – ‘I ran’, say, or ‘I slept’. But the shortness of these sentences is a result of their simplicity, not the cleverness of the words themselves. In Georgia, they do things differently. They can tell a whole story, all in a single word.
Shemomechama (shem-o-meh-DJAHM-uh) means ‘I didn’t mean to, but I suddenly found I had eaten all of it.’ It may not be an entirely convincing plea from a small boy standing in front of you with an empty plate and a guilty expression, but it’s an impres
sively complex idea to get across in a single word.
They can manage it largely because Georgian – one of a small group of languages in the Caucasus, with its own delicate and elegant script – has a number of varied and expressive prefixes, which can add subtle shades of meaning to the most simple verbs. So in this case, the mechama part of the word means ‘I had eaten’, but the shemo prefix combines an expression of desire, a reluctance to fulfil that desire and then a slightly shame-faced, shoulder-shrugging admission that temptation was too great.
Not even the Georgians can squeeze into that word a full explanation for why you’ve been so weak – maybe the food was particularly tasty, maybe you were unbearably hungry, or maybe you just kept nibbling away with your mind on other things and suddenly discovered to your horror that you’d eaten the lot. But that probably doesn’t matter – trying to come up with a reason isn’t going to make it any better as an excuse. Whoever you’re telling is still going to be pretty cross, although probably not as cross as in two other examples of the same prefix at work.
The first, shemomelakha (shem-o-meh-LAKH-uh), is the sort of thing you might say to the magistrate. It means, worryingly, ‘I only meant to rough him up a little, but I somehow found I had beaten him half to death.’ And the second, which could also get you into serious trouble, is shemometqvna (shem-o-meh-TKV’N-uh), which is not used in polite society and means something like ‘I was only thinking of a quick kiss and cuddle to begin with, but I somehow ended up … Well, the flesh is weak.’
The Greeks Had a Word For It Page 9