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

Physingoomai (Ancient Greek)

THERE ARE SOME foreign words the English language clearly needs – the case for them is so obvious that it hardly needs to be put. Others require a little more advocacy on their behalf. Take, for example, the Ancient Greek word physingoomai (fiz-in-goo-OH-mie).

It refers to someone who gets over-confident and sexually excited as a result of eating garlic. Fighting cocks were frequently fed garlic and onions before a bout because the Greeks – and later cockfight aficionados – believed that it would make the birds fiercer. The idea is that if men were to follow the example of the fighting cocks and gorge on garlic before going on a date, there would be no holding them back.

Whether or not garlic makes men horny, it certainly makes them smelly and thus less pleasant to be close to. As a result, even in these days when programmes about cooking are all over the television and when people seem more than happy to talk publicly about their sexual preferences, it seems unlikely that it is a word that is going to be used frequently outside the rather restricted world of cockfighting. Even the Ancient Greeks don’t seem to have required it all that often, since the word itself appears only once in the entire canon of Greek literature, referring to some soldiers from the town of Megara in a comedy by Aristophanes.

In the play, however excited the soldiers get, it’s apparent that they are going to have serious difficulties persuading any self-respecting Ancient Greek girls to kiss their garlic-reeking lips. The remedy they have sought to increase their sexual potency at the same time greatly reduces their ability to take advantage of it.

And there lies the clue to why physingoomai would be such a useful term in English. Young men who douse themselves in the sort of cheap aftershave that strips the lining from your nasal passages at first whiff; middle-aged men wearing blue jeans so tightly belted around where their waist used to be that their bellies sag opulently over the top; women of a certain age wearing clothes that would have been daring on their daughters – they are all, if they only knew it, falling into the same trap as the Megaran soldiers.

The adornments they have chosen to boost their confidence and make them more attractive to potential partners are exactly the things that will put those partners off. Cheap aftershave, tight belts and sagging bellies, and clothes that have been clearly stolen from your daughter’s wardrobe can be as effective as a garlic overdose in keeping people at arm’s length. Instead of whatever it was they were hoping for, those who rely on them to enhance their sexual appeal are likely to suffer what we might call a physingoomai experience. And there are few more physingoomai experiences than showing off by using long words to try to impress someone. Just talking about physingoomai could lead to the most humiliating physingoomai experience of all.

Cafuné (Brazilian Portuguese)

Think for a moment of the gentleness of affection. It needs a tone and a language of its own – not the urgent, demanding words of love and passion, but gentle, undemanding affection, the sort of love that asks for nothing. It is often so diffident and unassuming that it may sometimes seem to take itself – although never its object – for granted. It may be the warm, safe, family feeling between a mother or father and their child, or the love of grandparents for their grandchildren; perhaps it is the closeness between two people that may some day turn into love, or it may be the relaxed fondness that remains when the fire of a passionate affair has burned low. Either way, it demands its own expression.

In Brazil, they have a phrase that works – fazer cafuné em alguém means to show affection of exactly that sort. More precisely, cafuné (caf-OO-neh) often describes the act of running one’s fingers through somebody’s hair – possibly lulling them to sleep, or possibly simply expressing a drowsy fellow-feeling. Between two lovers, it might contain the gentlest hint of a sexual promise, precisely capturing the tender longing of the early days of a couple’s time together.

At other times, though, the word may be translated simply as ‘affection’. Many Brazilians say they are seized by a melancholy nostalgia when they are away from their home and thinking of their family, their religion and their memories. They miss their mother’s rabanada, a sort of French toast topped with sugar, cinnamon and chocolate that is traditionally served at Christmas; their aunt’s bacalhoada, or salted cod stew; and their grandma’s cafuné.

It’s not a particularly sentimental word in itself. Some authorities suggest that the gesture originated in a mother’s gentle search through her children’s hair for fleas and lice, and if that thought isn’t enough to quell any incipient sentimentality, it’s sometimes accompanied by the clicking of the fingernails to mimic the cracking of occasional nits. There’s still plenty of affection in the gesture – like two chimpanzees gently grooming each other – though the click of lice’s eggs being destroyed is not necessarily a sound you would wish to reproduce on a Valentine’s Day card, even if you could.

So it doesn’t apply only to humans. You might be gently tickling the head of a much-loved dog or cat, or – Brazilians being well known for their love of horses – stroking the soft, silky hair of a horse’s ears. It’s a pleasant experience for both the giver and the receiver, and it demands nothing from either of them. So it’s a word that describes a state of mind and the action that it leads to – not urgent, not demanding, maybe even slightly distracted and carried out with a mind that is floating aimlessly around other pleasant, undemanding topics. There is room for more cafuné in our lives.

Cinq-à-Sept (French)

In staid, respectable Britain, five o’clock in the afternoon signifies little more than the end of a nine-to-five working day, the peak of the rush hour and the time when a man’s chin may begin to bristle with shadow. In France, they do things differently, and with more style.

There, five o’clock marks – or used to mark – the start of le cinq-à-sept (SAÑK-a-SETT), those magical two hours that Frenchmen – or maybe Frenchwomen too, come to that – having slipped away from work, would spend whispering sweet Gallic nothings in the ears of their lovers. Or perhaps that was all part of the stereotype dreamed up by the envious English, who like to believe that everything French, whether it is maids, leave, kisses or knickers, must be slightly naughty.

In any case, by the mid-sixties the French writer Françoise Sagan was declaring in her novel La Chamade that this time for lovers was all in the past. ‘In Paris, no one makes love in the evening any more; everyone is too tired,’ sighed one of her characters.[1] It was not that the country had succumbed to a fit of English morality, just that the preferred time for illicit romance had moved forward in the afternoon to between two and four. Le cinq-à-sept had become le deux-à-quatre. The French were simply rescheduling their afternoon delight. They were not going to give up what the English referred to vulgarly as their ‘bit on the side’. After all, the wife and mistress of President Mitterrand stood side by side at his funeral; Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was rumoured to have so many mistresses that he had to leave a sealed letter saying where he might be found in case of emergency on any particular evening.

Going back further in history, the great nineteenth-century French playwright Alexandre Dumas is said to have returned home unexpectedly to find his wife in bed and, a few moments later, his best friend hiding naked in her wardrobe. With true Gallic flair, he ended up sleeping on one side of his slightly surprised wife, while the lover slept on the other.[2]

It’s worth noting that in Canada, where the French speakers have clearly lived for too many years alongside their strait-laced Anglophone compatriots, the phrase has lost its quietly salacious air: if a Québecois announces that he is going for a cinq-à-sept, he generally means no more than that he is planning to call in at the bar for happy hour.

The metropolitan French are made of sterner stuff. From Calais to the warm beaches of the Mediterranean, the true spirit of le cinq-à-sept lives on.

Démerdeur (French)

Drachenfutter (German)

It’s probably inevitable that a nation with an idea like le cinq-à-sept in its vocabulary should need another one – a word like démerdeur (DAY-MERRD-URR).

It means literally, with the bluntness of the peasant’s cottage rather than the subtlety of les aristos, someone who is proficient at getting himself out of the merde – a bit of a rascal who may often find himself in trouble but who generally works out a way to extricate himself without too much of a fuss. The French dictionary doesn’t list a feminine equivalent – if it did, it would presumably be démerdeuse – but there’s obviously no reason why women, too, shouldn’t be up to no good and similarly adept at avoiding the consequences.

Either way, there is a clear note of admiration about the word. Whatever sin you may have committed – and démerdeur is often used about the sort of misbehaviour associated with le cinq-à-sept – is more than outweighed by the imagination and dash with which you walk away from it. It’s much more direct than the rather prissy English reference to someone who ‘always comes up smelling of roses’. Deep down, just about every French man or woman would rather like to be a démerdeur or a démerdeuse.

In Germany, they do things differently. There, instead of the devil-may-care derring-do of the démerdeur, they have the careful planning and guilty foresight of the person who purchases Drachenfutter (DRACKH-en-foot-uh). Drachenfutter means ‘dragon-fodder’, and it refers to the hopeful gift, whether it be flowers, chocolates or a diamond necklace, with which you might attempt to assuage the feelings of a lover you have angered.

There’s something sly, underhand and insincere about Drachenfutter – a feeling that the person who buys that calculating little present is rather cold-hearted and cowardly. You can bet that they wouldn’t call their lover a dragon to their face. You might not want to get too close to a démerdeur either, but at least they sound like fun. You probably wouldn’t get many laughs with your Drachenfutter.

Do we need either word in English? Well, there are plenty of démerdeurs to be found on this side of the Channel. Footballers, musicians, politicians, lawyers – their names are to be found in the papers often enough. As for the less adventurous among us, the number of petrol stations selling sad bunches of wilting roses suggests that there must be quite a big market for Drachenfutter.

Koi no yokan (Japanese)

It’s not a coincidence that we talk of ‘falling’ in love. It’s a sudden thing, at least according to the songs – involuntary, inconvenient, irresistible, possibly even disastrous. It’s been compared, among other things, to being hit by a freight train. All in all, then, it doesn’t sound like a particularly enjoyable experience.

However, it doesn’t have to be any of those things. Just ask the Japanese. They have a phrase, koi no yokan (KOY-noh-yoh-CAN), which tells a very different story. It translates literally as ‘premonition of love or desire’, and it refers to the sense that you are about to fall in love with someone. There is no certainty, no commitment and probably no mutual awareness – certainly nothing is said – but the feeling is there. It’s not love, maybe not even desire – but it’s the realization that these things could be on the horizon.

The lazy translation into English is sometimes ‘love at first sight’, but koi no yokan is much more delicate and restrained than that. ‘Love at first sight’ is a shared surrender – glances across a room, strong emotions reflecting each other, a feeling of certainty. It’s getting your knife and fork straight into the main course, if you like, without having a starter, perhaps without even looking at the menu. Koi no yokan, on the other hand, is an individual sense of what might happen – the other person involved may at this stage know nothing of how you feel. It’s the difference between catching the faintest scent on the wind and, as we said before, being knocked down by a train. Koi no yokan senses the first tentative tremor of a feeling. It’s a surrender, above all, to the magic of potential.

With koi no yokan, you have the feeling of a subtle, almost imperceptible awareness, the sense that it will become an emotion that will eventually grow and develop over time. It’s so gentle that you may find, with a shock, that it’s been there for some time, somewhere in the back of your mind, without your realizing it.

So subtle is it that it’s not even the moment when you stand on the brink of a love affair, wondering whether you have the courage to jump in, like jumping from a rock into a pool – it’s more the moment when you wonder whether you might step up to the rock at all.

It might not lead to love immediately, or perhaps at all, and there may be many ups and downs and twists of fate still to come. For that reason, koi no yokan can be tinged with sadness as well as anticipation. Once you’re on the rock, even if you shiver there nervously for a while, it’s hard in the end not to jump in. But at this moment, there’s no pressure on you. You could turn and walk away. And be safe. The point about koi no yokan is that it makes no promises, stakes no claims. If you do jump, it’s your own responsibility – literally a leap of faith.

Having the word doesn’t necessarily give us the feeling, but it does help us to recognize it when it happens. And we can never have enough words to describe our emotions.

Hiraeth (Welsh)

Saudade (Portuguese)

People do fall in love in English, but the language sometimes lacks the means to express the delicate ways in which the experience can affect us. Love and sadness can be inextricably intertwined; there may be a dreamy but intense happiness at the love that was, and regret that it is gone, all touched with an uneasy sense that maybe it was never really as perfect as it now seems. If English had a word for that finely judged balance of emotions when a lover is wronged or a love is lost, there might be fewer bad love songs on the radio. The Welsh, however – the earliest occupants of Britain, as they might occasionally remind you – have just such a word.

Hiraeth (HEER-eth) is a broader, more all-consuming love. It refers usually to the native Welshman’s love of Wales, its valleys, its craggy coastline, its language, its poetry and its history. But this is much more than simply homesickness. When a Welsh baritone like Bryn Terfel sings about the welcome they’ll keep in the valleys when you come home again to Wales, he also promises that he’ll banish your hiraeth with a few kisses. Coming home, he’s saying, will assuage the longing that you feel.

It’s an empty promise. This is an ache that can never be truly relieved. Because hiraeth is also a longing for unattainable past times – for your own childhood or for the historic, much-mythologized past of Wales, the days before the Saxons, or the time of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd in the thirteenth century, or of Owain Glyndŵr in the fifteenth. For many, it could be a longing for the days of Wales as an independent nation.

But what has this to do with second-rate songs on the radio? Well, hiraeth can be felt for people, too. Mae hiraeth arna amdanot ti would translate as ‘I feel hiraeth for you.’ You might translate it as simply, ‘I miss you,’ but you would be cutting away all the emotion – handing over a cheap bunch of flowers bought in a supermarket rather than a bouquet, still jewelled with dew, that you picked yourself. The Welsh version means ‘I long for you deep in my soul; I long for the way we were, for the things we did together, the places we went, the dreams that we shared – and that we may share no more.’ You could write that in a poem. The English version, ‘Wish you were here,’ you’d put on a postcard.

Welsh isn’t the only language to boast such an evocative word. The Portuguese saudade (soh-DAHD) has been memorably translated as ‘the love that’s left behind’, and it has the same connotations of wistfulness and melancholy nostalgia, whether focused on a place or a person. Back in the seventeenth century, the aristocratic soldier-poet Francisco Manuel de Melo caught its knife-edge sense of mingled pleasure and pain with his definition: ‘A pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy’ – a phrase that could apply just as well to hiraeth.

Any Welshman will tell you that the difference between the Welsh language and the English language boils down to the fact that Wales is a romantic land of bards, poets and seers, while English is spoken by accountants in suits. But an Englishman might point defensively to the poetry of A. E. Housman and his ‘Land of Lost Content’ – ‘The happy highways where I went, and cannot come again.’[3] So an Englishman can feel hiraeth, even if he doesn’t have a word for it.

Mamihlapinatapei (Yaghan, Tierra del Fuego)

Few things, particularly emotions, are black and white.

Today, you may rather like someone who yesterday interested you only slightly. Tomorrow or the day after, you may enjoy their company even more, and sometime after that, you may fall in love. And in between each of those stages are a million shades of emotion, affection and desire that poets have struggled for centuries to define.

It’s not an area that English words are very good at capturing. The more complex our feelings, the more likely we are to have to create phrases, even sentences, to reflect them adequately – which is what poets and writers do for a living. But how wonderful to have one word that describes a single, nervous, shared moment at the beginning of that long and delicate process of falling in love – and how tragic that the language that provided it is now almost certainly extinct.

Yaghan, once spoken on the remote archipelago of Tierra del Fuego, is believed to have been one of very few languages in the world without external influences or connections with any other language on earth. It grew and developed on its own. It was spoken only by a few islanders at the very tip of South America, so far from anywhere that the islands knew only very occasional visitors, and over the last century or so it has been vanishing almost without trace – a language, a history and a culture lost as if they had never existed. The last known native speaker is now in her late eighties. Little is understood about the structure, grammar or vocabulary of Yaghan, beyond the existence of a rudimentary dictionary published in the late nineteenth century.

But one word survives: mamihlapinatapei (MAH-michk-la-pin-a-TA-pay, where the chk is pronounced at the back of the throat, like the Scottish loch). It refers to an unspoken understanding between two people, both of whom want to start something but who are each reluctant to make the first move. It’s very like the Japanese koi no yokan, then, except that this is essentially a feeling which two people share from the very start. It’s not certain whether it relates specifically to the beginning of an affair, but its relevance to those early moments where each one wonders how committed or willing the other might be is clear. It’s a word that oozes uncertainty and potential.

Many translations suggest that mamihlapinatapei includes a wordless exchange of glances, but even that seems to be too specific for this ghostly word, which seeks to pin down a moment that vanishes like mist. It’s not even certain whether it is a noun or a verb.

And the point about mamihlapinatapei is that it may not relate to the beginning of an affair, or of anything at all. Both the people involved are uncertain about what will happen next – it’s perfectly possible that nothing will and that the moment the word describes will remain one of the wistful might-have-beens that gather around the fringes of our memories.

Generally, we seek to pin words down to a particular meaning, the more specific the better. Vagueness in language is often seen as a lack of accuracy, and you would expect a legal document or a set of building instructions to be clear, concise and unambiguous. But what about when the situation you are seeking to describe is vague and uncertain? Mamihlapinatapei captures the delicacy of a subtle and nuanced moment in a way that in English would demand a sentence or a few lines of a poem.