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

Attaccabottoni (Italian)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner tells the tale of a guest hurrying to a wedding who unwisely catches the eye of a mysterious bearded stranger and as a result sits through 143 verses of his story and misses the ceremony. It’s an experience you may have had – usually without the benefit of hearing at first hand one of the great classics of English literature – when you’ve been buttonholed by charity collectors, religious enthusiasts or political canvassers.

If only you had known the Italian word attaccabottoni (at-ACK-a-bot-OH-ni). Once you can name a danger, it’s easier to face it down, and you could have stared the stranger fearlessly in the eye, dismissively murmured, ‘Attaccabottoni’, and walked on by. It means a buttonholer, and it refers to the type of bore who manoeuvres you into a corner and proceeds to tell you the long, tedious and apparently endless story of their life, their failed relationship, their children’s success with the violin, or the massive problems they’ve solved single-handedly at work … The one thing it will always be about is them, and how cruelly and unfairly they have been treated.

It might be foolish to waste too much sympathy on Coleridge, however. His friend, the essayist Charles Lamb, used to tell a story about him which amounts to a perfect description of an attaccabottoni. Coleridge had a habit of holding on to the coat button of the person he was talking to, to impress him with the urgency of what he was saying. Then, eyes closed and making languid gestures with his other hand, he would launch into his story, without a pause for breath. Lamb claimed to have put up with this assault on his time and patience for several minutes on one occasion before he took drastic action.

‘I saw that it was no use to break away so … with my penknife I quietly severed the button from my coat and decamped. Five hours later and passing the same garden on my way home, I heard Coleridge’s voice and, looking in, there he was with closed eyes, the button in his fingers, and his right hand gently waving, just as when I left him.’[4]

The tale sounds pretty unlikely, but it’s the sort of anecdote that ought to be true, if only because it reflects the feelings of so many of us when we are in a hurry to be somewhere but can’t bring ourselves to be rude enough to walk away. The only difference is that Coleridge was a dear friend of Lamb’s, and this story is told with a good-humoured affection that few of us feel for the earnest doorstep preachers who occasionally keep us from our dinner.

It’s easy to tell if you have just been the victim of a common or garden bore or of a dedicated and skilled attaccabottoni. Conversations should be a matter of give and take; if, as you limp away wearily from your encounter, you have a nagging feeling that you have learned a lot about the other person but said very little about yourself, then you can be sure that you have suffered at the hands of a master. A true attaccabottoni finds nothing remotely interesting but himself. Or herself – the noun can be masculine or feminine in Italian.

It might be possible to feel a degree of sympathy for an attaccabottoni – anyone who has to clap you in irons to make you stay and listen is unlikely to have a lot of friends. But you should harden your heart – your attacker is exploiting your own decency and good manners and turning them into weapons against you. It would be easy enough to tell them to shut up and walk away, if only you were ruder than you are. If by using the word attaccabottoni – which they won’t understand anyway – you can make yourself feel better about hurrying past, then you will have saved valuable minutes of your life and done no harm.

Davka (Hebrew)

There is always room in a language for one more word, which, with its surly defiance, its refusal to engage, its sheer unreason, enables teenagers to drive adults to impotent distraction. One like the English word ‘Whatever’, which says, ‘Yes, I’ve heard you, but I’m not interested, I’m not going to pay any attention, and I’m going to keep doing exactly what it was that you said I shouldn’t.’

A word, perhaps, like the Hebrew davka (DAV-ka). It is a word with a long history, its roots reaching back into the ancient Middle Eastern language of Aramaic. It is used in the Jewish Talmud and in rabbinical commentaries on it to mean ‘precisely’ or ‘in this way and no other’. Matzah, for instance, the unleavened bread traditionally eaten during the Passover holiday, is made davka from wheat, barley, spelt, rye and oats. No other grains will do.

Today, davka retains that meaning, but it has also gathered a sense of deliberation and contrariness, so that it often has a sarcastic overtone. English sometimes pulls the same trick with the word ‘precisely’ – ‘Do you know how many biscuits he’d left me in the tin? Precisely one.’ The implication is that you might have hoped for more than that, but one was all you got, and that’s pretty much just as you’d expect.

Davka can have much the same ‘Just like him’ edge to it – ‘I asked for a red shirt, so, davka, he bought me a blue one’ – but it often has a wider implication that the world as a whole is being cruel to you. Fate is not on your side – ‘I was in a hurry, so, davka, the bus was late.’ A child who is said to be ‘doing davka’ is being contrary and difficult, in the way that children can be.

So the word has a variety of meanings, which English might try to pick up in several different ways. But the one that might be most useful – the one that Israelis speaking English say they miss most – is when it is used as a gruff, one-word response to someone in authority. In English, if you ask your surly teenage son where he is going, you might get the answer, ‘Out.’ Or if you ask your daughter what she has in her bag, ‘Stuff.’

So in Hebrew, you might ask, ‘Why are you doing that?’ and get the answer, ‘Davka’ – because I choose, because I want to do it this way rather than any other. Just because. It’s about expressing determination, independence and a degree of contempt, all in one word.

And don’t we all have a little bit of teenager in us every now and then?

Ilunga (Tshiluba, Democratic Republic of Congo)

Ilunga (IL-UNG-AH) had its fifteen minutes of fame back in 2004, when the BBC reported that it had been chosen as the world’s most untranslatable word in ‘a list drawn up in consultation with 1,000 linguists’. Oddly, the article then went on to translate it with some confidence as ‘a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time’ – which seems to suggest that it’s actually quite straightforward to translate, if a little lengthy.

The idea of a word being the hardest to translate is a bit strange anyway – certainly until you’ve defined which language you’re translating into. A word that’s hard to translate into English may have a perfect equivalent in Korean or Welsh.

Ilunga comes from the Bantu Tshiluba language, spoken by some six million people in the southern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Other commentators weighed in to the BBC immediately with their own suggestions, including several who put forward the American saying ‘Three strikes and you’re out’ as an equivalent.

For anyone who knows nothing about the rules of baseball, that sentence would itself be pretty hard to translate, and that fact seems to highlight one of the most intractable difficulties of translation. It’s all very well to replace one word with another – a carretilla in Spain, or a schubkarre in Germany, would probably look very much like a wheelbarrow in England – but it’s the unspoken assumptions and cultural implications that go with a word that can make it almost impossible to replicate in a different language.

‘Three strikes and you’re out’ has a threatening ring to it – an implication that justice is implacable and inevitable. The rules of baseball, after all, are very clear and brook no argument on the subject, which is the reason for carrying the phrase into the administration of the criminal law: there will be no argument and no plea in mitigation. It might even sound rather smug.

That’s certainly not the case with the meaning of ilunga, which describes a gradual, even unwilling diminution of sympathy. The emphasis is on the mercy that is shown at first, rather than on the condemnation that will eventually follow – precisely the opposite of ‘Three strikes and you’re out.’

It may be unrealistic to think that we are such a patient and forgiving people that we need a word which suggests that our first instinct in response to any injury would be forgiveness, and that our preference is always to show mercy until the offender has demonstrated once and for all that he is just going to take advantage of our gentleness. But it’s a very nice idea.

Schlimazl & Shlemiel (Yiddish)

We all have moments when it seems as if the world is ganging up against us – moments when we’ve spent an hour getting ourselves ready for an important occasion, with a new suit and freshly polished shoes, only for a car to drive past through a puddle and cover us with mud. Moments when we’ve written a particularly fine letter on our computer and are just about to print it out when there’s a power cut. Moments when we sit down on a broken chair that collapses beneath us, or lean against a door that’s just been painted.

We all go through those Charlie Chaplin experiences that would seem very funny if only they were happening to someone else but are near-disasters when they happen to us. For most of us they don’t really happen all that often – it just feels as if they do. But suppose they happened to you all the time – what would you be then, apart from suicidal?

For some people, petty disasters do seem to be a way of life. And if you’re one of them, you’re a schlimazl (shli-MAZL). It’s an old Yiddish word that means someone who is chronically unlucky, someone to whom bad things happen all the time. These mishaps are probably nobody’s fault, and they’re not tragedies, not disasters that are going to ruin a person’s life, but they are the ridiculous little accidents that can drive you to distraction. Why me, you say.

However, it could be worse. Suppose it was all your own fault? Rather than have a random car drive past and soak you, you might have tripped over into the puddle all by yourself, stumbling over the shoelace you hadn’t tied properly. Instead of a power cut, you might have lost your beautifully crafted letter because you’d turned off the computer by accident. Maybe the chair was fine, but you were just too heavy for it. And how much more annoying would it have been if you’d painted the door yourself?

In those cases, it would be your own foolishness or clumsiness that was to blame, and instead of being a hapless schlimazl you’d be a hopeless shlemiel (shlum-EEL). At least if you’re a schlimazl, when people have finished laughing at you, they’ll feel a moment of sympathy for your hard luck. If you’re a shlemiel, a person who is so clumsy and awkward that you only have to pick up something fragile to drop it, then the chances are that the only response you’re likely to get will be a sneering ‘Serves you right.’

And there are refinements of this miserable fate. Sometimes the shlemiel will resent the reputation he has acquired so much that he will try to do ambitious things that even someone who is not naturally clumsy would avoid, just to prove that he’s not as clumsy as everyone thinks. He – or she – will carry tottering piles of plates and glasses, or scoff at the idea of putting down a piece of newspaper before they start painting. The shlemiel will balance a bowl of soup on his outstretched fingers and move it around in the air, just to prove that he can. And, of course, he can’t. It always ends in tears. Not even Yiddish has a word for such a hopeless case. In fact, the bowl of soup can be used as an example to demonstrate the difference between the two: when the shlemiel spills his soup, it lands on the schlimazl.

The two words are ideal as light-hearted insults – the sort of remarks that elicit a rueful smile and a shrug of the shoulders from their object, rather than a punch on the nose. Surely a language can never have too many words like that.

Mafan (Mandarin)

We all have them – those moments of angst, world-weariness and frustration when something is just too much trouble. It may be something we’ve done a thousand times before without complaining – taking out the rubbish, washing the car or taking the dog for a walk. Suddenly, for no particular reason, it’s just one thing too many and we’re not going to do it.

‘I can’t be bothered,’ we might say, and it’s likely to make people cross. And, most of the time, and probably with ill grace, we somehow end up doing whatever it is that needs doing.

That’s the problem with ‘I can’t be bothered.’ It’s a blunt phrase that, just at a time when you really don’t feel like taking responsibility, puts you right in the firing line. It’s not what you want to say: the problem is with the suddenly unreasonable demand that is being made, not with your own response to it. What you want is a phrase that throws the blame where you instinctively know it belongs – on the person who has made the request, on the action itself, on the entire world if necessary, but not on you.

The Chinese have an invaluable little word – mafan (MAH-FAHN). Some people say that if you learn only one word of Chinese, then mafan is the one – although that could be a reflection on the frustrations of Chinese bureaucracy rather than a comment on the word itself.

It means something you’ve been asked to do is too bothersome – just too much trouble. It’s frustrating, annoying and completely unreasonable that you have been asked. But the important thing about it is that it focuses the blame where it should be – not on you.

Its applications are almost infinite. A tax form may be too complicated for anyone but a Professor of Incomprehensible Logic to understand, and you would ask, ‘Why is this so mafan?’ Or it could be used against you in a restaurant, when you ask if you could have the noodles but without the meat – ‘No, that’s too mafan for the chef.’

And the beauty of it is that it’s not an exclusively dismissive or negative word. You can apologize – probably insincerely, but no one’s to know – for causing someone so much mafan. Tack -ni, meaning ‘you’, on to it and it is suddenly an extremely polite and courteous way of asking a question, more or less equivalent to ‘Excuse me, may I trouble you?’ So you might say, ‘Mafan-ni, could you tell me the way to the station?’

But we do politeness well in English already. We have plenty of ingratiating little phrases with which to butter people up when we want them to do us a favour. It’s that subtle evasion of responsibility that we need, that deft avoidance of blame. ‘Shouldn’t you take the dog for a walk?’ ‘Mafan.’

It shouldn’t work, of course. It would seem to drip with the same sort of dismissive contempt that an idle teenager can pour over the words ‘Whatever,’ or ‘Yeah, right.’ But the Chinese seem to manage mafan quite successfully. Perhaps we should give it a go in English.

Pochemuchka (Russian)

‘Yes, but why?’

As anyone who has children will know, these words bring a thrill of joy to our hearts the first time we hear them, because we are new parents, and idealistic, and optimistic, and we want to encourage a healthy curiosity in our offspring. And so we offer a carefully crafted and well-thought-out explanation, not too simple but pitched at exactly the right level for our child’s understanding.

‘Yes, but why?’

The next explanation has a slightly puzzled edge to it. We thought we’d answered that one the first time. So we try again.

‘Yes, but why?’

The third explanation is probably a little shorter and slightly less carefully crafted. It might even have a barely perceptible edge of frustration. There is, after all, a newspaper that we want to read, or a programme to watch, or a car to polish.

‘Yes, but why?’

The fourth explanation is even shorter. It may well contain an unfortunate phrase like ‘For God’s sake!’ in it, or possibly something even less acceptable. And so it goes on, six or seven times or more, until, to our eternal shame, we come through clenched teeth to the final and unavoidable, ‘Because I say so!’

This child with the healthy curiosity that we were once so keen to encourage is what the Russians would call a pochemuchka (POH-chay-MOO-chka) – someone who asks too many questions. It comes from the Russian word pocemu (POH-chay-MUH), which means ‘Why?’, and was first used in a popular Soviet-era children’s book[5] whose hero was a little boy given the nickname Alyosha Pochemuchka because he was never satisfied with the answers he got. The book was published in 1939, when Stalin was at the height of his power, so discouraging children from trying to find out too much was probably a wise move for cautious parents, but it’s generally the sort of light-hearted put-down that might be expressed in English with a warning like ‘Curiosity killed the cat.’

The diminutive suffix -uchka makes clear that it’s meant affectionately, but do we really need a word like this? Once we’ve got over the frustration of a long train of ‘Yes, but whys’, we don’t really want to tell our children not to ask too many questions.

But the term doesn’t have to be applied only to children. It may not be a clever way to address a Russian policeman who is asking you for details of where you’ve been and whom you’ve seen, but assimilated into English it might be a very useful word to use to a local government official who won’t go away, or anyone in authority for whom it would be much less aggressive than a bad-tempered ‘Mind your own business.’ That patronizing -uchka at the end, the verbal equivalent of patting the person you are speaking to on the head, might also give a very pleasant feeling of superiority.

Schnorrer (Yiddish)

Make the mistake of getting out of a taxi without leaving a big enough tip and you may hear the taxi driver mutter under his breath, ‘Schnorrer!’ (SHNORR-uh). This, you will understand instinctively, is not a compliment.

Originally, the word was used by Jews about Jews, describing a dishonest beggar – a man, for example, who might dress as a gentleman, talk with all the pretensions of a scholar and treat his companion with expansive and condescending civility, but who would still ask for the loan of the price of a phone call. And then ask again. And again for something else.

Such a man would give elaborate and generally entirely imaginary reasons for asking for help – he might have been robbed, his house might have burned down, or he might find himself temporarily embarrassed at a moment when he needs to pay to get his car mended, settle an annoying bill, or offer assistance to a relative who has fallen on hard times. In any case, since both the schnorrer and generally his victim as well are Jewish, there is an overriding moral duty to help him. The more emotional and affecting the story, the better.

A particular kind of schnorrer, the literary schnorrer, might offer copies of a book he has written – always a literary masterpiece, in which he has selflessly invested years of hard and unrewarded work – in return for whatever gift of money the wealthy recipient thinks appropriate. And if the gift is not large enough, the schnorrer is likely to make it very clear that he is unimpressed.

Rather than sitting at the roadside asking for alms, the schnorrer engages with his target, giving the impression that he expects support as of right and is actually conferring a favour by offering the opportunity to give him money or goods. The frequent translation ‘beggar’ fails to reflect the impudence and presumption of the true schnorrer, whose shameless audacity is best summed up in another Yiddish word, chutzpah (HOOT-spa). Other words like ‘sponger’, ‘chiseller’ or ‘freeloader’ miss the all-important element of entitlement, while ‘con man’ or ‘confidence trickster’ do not include the sense of duty that the true schnorrer seeks to instil in his victim.

The English writer Israel Zangwill, working at the end of the nineteenth century, published a satirical novel named The King of Schnorrers, which tells the story of a Sephardic Jew, the grandly named Manasseh Bueno Barzillai Azevedo da Costa, who plays on his claims of scholarship, family background and royal connections to fleece a succession of more or less gullible victims. More ironically, the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl, around the same time, said that the best-kept secret of his campaign was the work of ‘an army of schnorrers possessing a dream’ who hassled and persuaded and cajoled Jews across Europe to support his idea of a Jewish state.

Your taxi driver is probably not remembering these literary antecedents and probably not even thinking of the traditional characteristics of the Jewish schnorrer. He is simply using the best word available to describe a tightwad, a miser, a Scrooge and a skinflint, all rolled together and invested with all the contempt, mockery and derision that the Yiddish language can muster.

Or nearly all. If you don’t leave any tip, you may hear the word schnorrerdicke (SHNORR-uh-DICK-uh). That means the same, but much, much more so. Better by far to give him his tip in the first place – and make it a big one.

Handschuhschneeballwerfer & Sitzpinkler (German)

Few national stereotypes can be as undeserved as the reputation that the Germans have picked up for having no sense of humour. How can that possibly be true of a people who speak a language with words that are seventy-nine letters long? Their habit of creating a new compound word by the simple expedient of sticking together two, three, four or more old ones would seem logically to mean that German can translate any number of words in any language with just one of its own.

Practical stuff. But how could you use a word like Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbau-unterbeamtengesellschaft without sniggering? It means ‘The association for junior officials of the head office management of the Danube steamboat electrical services’, and if any journalist were ever foolish enough to use it, it would run into three lines of a single column in a broadsheet newspaper – not that it crops up much in conversation. I suspect that, like its rather less impressive English equivalents antidisestablishmentarianism (opposition to a policy of taking away the Church of England’s special role in the state) or floccinaucinihilipilification (the act of valuing something as practically worthless), Donaudampfschiffahrt etc. is one of those words cobbled together simply to give schoolchildren something to laugh and marvel at.

So the German language’s capacity for making new compounds from old words results in more than just astonishing length. It also gives the language an enviable sense of fun. Take handschuhschneeballwerfer (hant-shoo-SHNAY-ball-vairf-uh) and sitzpinkler (SIT-spink-luh), for instance. Each of them arrives at pretty much the same meaning, although they take a different route to get there. And you probably wouldn’t want either of them to be applied to you.

A handschuh is, literally, a ‘hand-shoe’ – a glove. (If you couldn’t work that out for yourself, you haven’t got into the spirit of compound words.) Schnee is snow, so schneeball is pretty obvious; and the verb werfen is what you do to one. So a handschuhschneeballwerfer is a person who wears gloves to throw snowballs. That is not interpreted, as you might think, as someone who has at least an ounce of common sense but as someone who is scared to get his hands cold – hence, a bit of a wuss, a wimp or a softy.

These days you wouldn’t translate that word into English as ‘a big girl’. For sitzpinkler, however, that might just be an ideal translation. A sitz is a seat, and pinkeln is what you might do privately while you were sitting down, if you happen to be a woman. (I’m making an effort to be delicate here.) So a sitzpinkler is a man who sits down to pee, hence a man who behaves like a woman, and hence – well, someone who’s not very macho in a patriarchal society where real men used to show off their duelling scars.

In an English conversation, each of these two words has the advantage of being mildly insulting in a way that won’t be understood and therefore won’t get you into trouble. But, if you are sufficiently sexist to want to use sitzpinkler as a term of abuse, you should be warned that times are changing. In these metrosexual days, it might actually be taken as a compliment. Signs have appeared in some German toilets warning that stehpinkeln (the opposite of sitzpinkeln) is messy and antisocial. Gadgets exist that play a recorded message to that effect every time a defiant man raises the seat. These warnings come in a variety of voices, including those of the former chancellors Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schröder.

Imagine some British manufacturer bringing out a similar gadget using the voices of Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair or David Cameron. But maybe that would be taking the cliché of the nanny state just a bit too far.

Soutpiel (Afrikaans)

Sometimes, just sometimes, it’s necessary to be vulgar to get your point across with sufficient force. Take the occasions, for instance, when you are fully committed to an idea or a project, and you have poured yourself heart and soul into ensuring its success. There will be no second thoughts for you – you have burned your bridges, and you’re not looking back.

Perhaps it’s a minor issue, like playing for a football team or joining a political party, or perhaps it’s something life-changing, not just for you but for generations to come – something like building a nation, for instance.

You’ll hope that your commitment will inspire others to follow you – if it doesn’t, you may be doomed to failure – but you expect those who follow to feel the same level of enthusiasm and single-mindedness when they join as you had right at the beginning. Instead, as the venture begins to show the first signs that it is going to work, you find people flocking to reap the fruits of your hard work while carefully preserving their way out in case things go wrong.

Instead of diving in alongside you, they are constantly looking back nervously over their shoulders, ready to pull out and run for cover the first time things take a turn for the worse.

What’s the word you would choose to describe such people? ‘Freeloaders’ might do, except that it doesn’t carry the sense of cowardly retrospection that you are looking for. ‘Fainthearts’ the same – and neither one begins to touch the contempt and ridicule that you want to express.

That is the problem, early in the twentieth century, which faced the Afrikaaner farmers of South Africa – a people who, with some justification, did not enjoy a good press during much of that century. They felt that the English settlers who had flooded out there after the Boer War were never wholeheartedly committed to the future of South Africa, that they maintained close links to Europe, with property and investments ‘back home’ as an insurance policy in case they needed to cut and run.

‘Soutpiel,’ (SOHT-peel) some leathery-faced old Boer must have spat into the dust as he chewed his biltong. The word means literally, in Afrikaans, ‘salt-dick’, and at that moment he gave to the world the memorable image of someone standing with one foot in South Africa and the other in England, his legs stretched so that his penis dangled in the sea. The same thought might apply today to those in England who want to stay in the European Union but defend Britain’s right to do things differently, or perhaps the many celebrities who seem to live on both sides of the Atlantic at once.

Today, soutpiel has been softened into the almost affectionate ‘soutie’ (SOHT-y), and in town if not in the rural Afrikaaner heartland, English-speaking South Africans may even sometimes use it to describe themselves.

Other former colonial nations have coined their own less-than-respectful names for the citizens of the mother country. The Americans have limey, a contemptuous reference to the lime juice that would be added to the Royal Navy’s rum ration during the nineteenth century – a sneer that rather backfired, as the vitamin C in the lime juice did at least keep the sailors free from scurvy and the oozing wounds, loose teeth, jaundice, fever and death to which it led.

In Australia, no one really knows where the term Pom comes from, though there have been several unconvincing explanations such as Pomegranate, describing the colour that the fair-skinned English went in the sun, or P.O.H.M.S., short for Prisoner of Her Majesty’s Service. The Scots have Sassenach, which means Saxon, not necessarily affectionately, and shows what long memories the Celts have.

But nothing matches the scorn and derision of that vivid Afrikaaner image of the Englishman stretching desperately to keep a foot in both countries, with his pride and joy dangling disconsolately in the chilly waters of the South Atlantic.