The Greeks Had a Word for It: Words You Never Knew You Can’t Do Without

Shemomechama (Georgian)

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 impressively 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.’

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)

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)

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)

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 prosaically, 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.

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) 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)

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 however 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)

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)

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)

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)

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!