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

Komorebi (Japanese)

It’s a spectacle that’s hard to forget.

The Canal du Midi, cutting through 150 miles of southern France and linking the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean, is an engineering wonder of the seventeenth century. Its creator, Pierre-Paul Riquet, kept around twelve thousand workers on the job with picks and shovels for fifteen years. But it’s not the history, or the technological marvels, or even the human triumphs that remain with the traveller – just the staggering, overwhelming beauty of the place.

Sailing through it, the water ahead of the boat is glassy-still, so the reflection of the weathered old stone bridge forms a complete circle, in which it is hard to see where the stone ends and the water begins. The boat noses softly through this magic circle to the other side as if it were a scene from Alice Through the Looking Glass. And the silent lines of plane trees, planted for the practical purpose of holding the soil of the banks together, filter the harsh southern sun into a stippled, shivering carpet of light and shadow.

It is one of the most beautiful sights many visitors have ever seen. And there is a Japanese word that describes it exactly.

Komorebi (KOH-MOH-REHB-i) is made up of a group of characters which individually signify trees, escape and sunlight, and it’s usually translated – or rather described – as sunlight filtering through the leaves. For a simple translation we might try dappled shade, but once you’ve seen this particular light, you’ll realize how inadequate that is.

For a start, it looks at that magical, shimmering atmosphere from a slightly pedestrian angle – at the shade rather than at the light. And, even worse, it concentrates on the pattern on the ground rather than on the quality of the light itself. The Japanese, on the other hand, see the shafts of sunlight shifting and dancing as the leaves move – light escaping from the trees, as the word puts it. Komorebi is neither light nor shade, neither sky nor earth, neither movement nor stillness, but the delicate interplay between all of them.

That awareness of light and its subtle creation of atmosphere is a quintessential aspect of the appreciation of nature among the Japanese. A Japanese garden will be a flickering patchwork of light and shade, not just a collection of neatly labelled plants. Komorebi provides a gentle, understated hint of the characteristic way in which the Japanese see the beauty of the world about them.

But it’s not only the light, the shifting colours and the delicacy of the scene that komorebi celebrates, it’s also a beauty of almost unimaginable fragility. The smallest cloud across the sun, a wind any stronger than a light breeze that moves the branches about too violently, and it vanishes as if it had never been there.

And, in that sense, the word applies exactly to the beauty of the Canal du Midi, too. For all Riquet’s engineering genius, the canal has proved to be fragile. Along great stretches of the banks, the plane trees that helped to produce that shimmering light are gone, cut down to try to protect the rest from the ravages of an infectious, incurable fungus. Rough-cut stumps line the water’s edge like rotten teeth, and the harsh sun beats down without any trembling leaves to lessen its glare. All that is left is the memory of komorebi.

Dreich (Scots)

Scotland has provided many valued benefits to the world, ranging from porridge to penicillin, Scotch whisky to the steam engine, tarmac to the telephone. Given that the wettest place in the whole of Europe is Scotland’s western Highlands, it is not surprising that they have also given us the most memorable and evocative word to describe persistently dull, wet, cold, dreary and unforgiving weather.

Dreich (DREECH, with the final ch pronounced as in loch) is an ancient word. Scandinavian in origin, it originally meant tedious or protracted, like a job that drags on and on, a book that doesn’t know when to end, or a long and boring sermon. The novelist and poet George Macdonald referred in the late nineteenth century to ‘The kirk, whan the minister’s dreich and dry.’[13] He was a minister himself, so he presumably knew what he was talking about. This sense of delay, or an unwillingness to get to a conclusion, led to another phrase, dreich in drawin’, which could be applied to someone who seemed to be taking an unreasonable time to make a decision – a suitor, in particular, who showed no sign of wanting to get married.

That meaning of apparent endlessness is still there in the word dreich when it is used about the weather – the thing about a dreich day, apart from the cold, the sunlessness and the miserable, soaking drizzle, is that it seems as if it’s never going to end. To call it particularly Scottish weather might be a gross libel on a country which, whatever the statistics say, has palm trees growing on the Ayrshire coast, but it remains a favourite word for Scottish poets describing the place where they live. Alexander Gray, for instance, in his poem ‘December Gloaming’,[14] writes movingly of the gloominess of the shortening days as the year draws to a close and the cold dreich winter days when night is falling at four in the afternoon. And a recent poll to establish the Scottish nation’s favourite home-grown word resulted in a runaway victory for dreich, with nearly a quarter of the total votes cast.

What makes it especially attractive is its onomatopoeic quality – its long-drawn-out vowel sound, followed by the back-of-the-throat ch, as in loch or Auchtermuchty, seems to echo a yeeuch of disgust and resignation – two words which, in regard to the weather at least, demonstrate how much the Scots and English have in common. And yet dreich was lost to standard English centuries ago. That’s odd, given that one of the distinguishing traits of the Anglo-Saxon peoples is their ability to talk so long, so passionately and so tediously about the weather. Maybe it’s because the English, unlike the more realistic Scots, tend to cling even on the dullest days to an unreasonably optimistic belief that there is a tiny patch of blue sky and it’ll brighten up yet.

Perhaps dreich is a word that Scots can safely use about Scotland, but the English had better not. And to tread even more dangerous territory as to whether dreich might relate to anything deeply rooted in the Scottish character is a subject for a braver book than this one. However, it’s worth remembering P. G. Wodehouse’s assertion that ‘It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.’[15]

Hozh’q (Navajo)

We like to say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and when we do we may think that we have said something profound. But we don’t really believe the words – after all, we read books of critical theory and listen to experts telling us what is a good painting or a fine poem. So perhaps it would be truer to say that, for most people, beauty is what’s put in the eye of the beholder. Once we start to unpick the sentence, we can begin to see how unsatisfactory it really is.

The eye, marvellous as it is, sees only the surface of things. But what if we think of beauty as a quality that we not only see with our eyes but also experience deep within our souls? Does it affect our lives? Can it change our view of the world, transform us into different people?

The Navajo of the south-western United States would answer all these questions with an unqualified ‘Yes’. Their word hozh’q (HOH-shkuh) describes the way that the beauty of the external world is seen and appreciated by each individual for himself, not only in his eyes but in his heart. It is no less than a guide for living a fulfilling life. It is an ideal – but an attainable ideal. Beauty, it says, is an essentially subjective and personal concept, and in finding it and experiencing it in both heart and soul, an individual learns what is important to him or her.

The nineteenth-century artist, designer, poet and novelist William Morris offered a golden rule: ‘Have nothing in your life that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.’[16] The Navajo of his day might not have accepted the distinction between what is useful and what is beautiful, but, in the unlikely event that they ever heard what Morris said, they would have understood his advice. Hozh’q would remove from life the search for wealth, material goods and social advancement, and replace it with a deep, wholehearted and transformational appreciation of the beauty of the world.

Put like that, hozh’q sounds like an ideal philosophy and a sobering corrective to today’s grab-and-go lifestyle, but it is hard to imagine many takers for it in the modern world. So is it possible to have a little hozh’q in your life? Is it something you can train yourself to develop in your character, like patience or tolerance, or is it an all-or-nothing concept, like virginity?

The Navajo might say the latter, but if we could borrow the concept along with the word, I can’t see why it shouldn’t become a part of our daily lives. When people retire from their day job, they often adopt a whole different range of priorities. Getting and having becomes a lot less important than seeing, hearing, doing and enjoying. But most of us don’t think about beauty that often. The concept of hozh’q might remind us that there’s more out there than just the things we own and the contents of our bank accounts.

Gökotta (Swedish)

It has to be one of the best things in the world. It’s early morning and for most people the day hasn’t even started. A new sun is rising and you can feel the air getting warmer by the minute, perhaps there’s dew on the grass, and all around you is the sound of birdsong. Not just the birds but the whole world is waking up.

In Sweden, they call that trip out into the early morning gökotta (yer-KOHT-ta). The word means literally ‘early-morning cuckoo’, and it strictly refers to such a trip taken specifically on Ascension Day, some six weeks after Easter. Traditionally, it’s a time for early-morning picnics in a clearing in the forest, in the hope of hearing the cuckoo, which usually arrives back in Sweden from its winter migration sometime during May. The direction from which you hear its call and the number of times that you hear it are supposed to mean good or back luck.

But the Swedes love the countryside in all its manifestations, whether it’s the wilderness, the crashing rivers and the mountain peaks of the north, the rolling countryside and endless beaches of the south, or the forests that cover two-thirds of the country. It’s no surprise that a tradition like this, which celebrates the accessibility and friendliness of nature, should have spread to cover any early-morning excursion, at any time of the year.

In English, we might extend the meaning of the word even further, to cover any trip out which involves getting up early and going outside to enjoy the start of the day and the sounds that it brings. The cuckoo has always been special in England just as in Sweden, because of its shyness, its distinctive call and the regularity with which it arrives and departs with the spring and early summer. Two hundred years ago, William Wordsworth wrote about it:

Oh blithe newcomer! I have heard,

I hear thee and rejoice.

Oh cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird,

Or but a wandering Voice?[17]

Our love of this seasonal visitor goes back for centuries. But perhaps you don’t need the cuckoo for a gökotta, though if you’re lucky enough to hear one, it’s a real bonus. Out in the countryside, there are still plenty of songbirds to reward you with the different sounds of their various calls, and there is still the unmistakable sense of a new day starting and the world coming to life.

We could go still further in redefining gökotta: not many countries, after all, are as rural as Sweden, and many people in the English-speaking world would find it impossible to reach a secluded forest glen early in the morning. So why not enjoy a gökotta in a town or city, just to celebrate a spring morning? The distinctive birdsong and sounds of nature won’t be there – although some of the parks in London or other big cities might provide something close – but there are other sounds and experiences that are peculiar to early morning in an urban environment.

The rattle of shutters going up as shops start opening for business, the scrape and thud of boxes being moved inside off the pavement, the shuffle of half-asleep feet and the thunder of an early-morning bus aren’t quite the traditional sounds of a Swedish gökotta, but there would still be the warmth of the sun and the sense of the world starting up afresh. Spring is the spring, sunshine is sunshine, and early morning is early morning wherever you are. What’s not to like?