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

Nemawashi (Japanese)

For centuries, the Japanese have created gardens – stylized, formal and traditional oases of calm – to encourage contemplation, provide refuge from a busy life, or simply as places where they could stroll and enjoy the peaceful sounds of running water and the breeze in the trees. They have, along the way, perfected the art of bonsai, the delicate cultivation of miniature trees that goes back for at least fifteen hundred years.

Both these skills demand patience, forethought, careful planning and, crucially, the development of specific techniques to achieve the result the designer wishes. Such a technique is nemawashi.

Nemawashi (neh-MAOU-a-shi) means, literally, ‘going around the roots’ and refers to the painstaking process by which a tree is prepared to be transplanted into the place that has been assigned to it in the overall design. The roots will be exposed one by one and carefully prepared for the trauma of being dug up and moved, so that the whole tree remains healthy and vigorous in its new location.

In its modern sense, nemawashi describes the equally delicate and important process of getting ready for a meeting. Using the same image we could say, rather more prosaically, that it’s the process of ‘preparing the ground’. But the Japanese go about it in a much more determined and systematic way.

There will be one-to-one talks with people who are to be present, so that their support can be guaranteed and their ideas incorporated into the proposal. Senior members of the management team will expect to be informed and consulted in advance, and small groups from the whole decision-making team may be set up to hold preparatory discussions. The key to all these activities is their informality, before the all-important full meeting. It’s all about sharing information, reaching a consensus and at all costs avoiding argument and public loss of face.

It also widens the pool of people whose opinions and contributions are sought. In the Toyota Production System, devised by the car-making giant as a consistent and efficient process to be followed in all their factories, nemawashi is seen as the first step in reaching any important decision. It often involves consulting all the employees about a new plan, from shop floor to boardroom, and aiming, in theory at least, at a company-wide consensus.

The expectation is that before anyone brings a proposal to a formal meeting, they will have carried out nemawashi to get a wide range of views about it and understand the problem from as many viewpoints as possible. But it is more than just a one-off event, a preparation for a specific meeting. It’s built into the whole way of working, from top to bottom, of a Japanese company.

For example, a detailed study of the way a production line in a factory works may reveal a small change that could be made to improve efficiency, but before the team who carried out the research make their formal proposal, they will take the idea to the shop-floor workers who run the line, to the fork-lift drivers who move products from place to place, and to the supervisors who have day-to-day control of the whole process. Management will still make the ultimate decision but in the knowledge that everyone involved will have had a chance to fine-tune the idea.

It involves sharing, not owning, ideas at the very earliest stage. It’s a search for new insights, new ways of refining and improving the proposal.

Would simply adopting the word lead to a more inclusive, more consultative style of management in companies in the English-speaking world? Might it help the search for improved productivity in British industry? Those would be big claims for a single word. But the best reason for incorporating nemawashi into English is simply because of where it comes from. It’s a word that takes a centuries-old technique from the peaceful and relaxed world of oriental gardening and applies it to the hectic modern world of industry and manufacturing. Now that’s a good idea.

Andrapodismos (Ancient Greek)

The ancient greeks gave us democracy, and philosophy, and drama, and mathematics, and the Olympic Games. They were, we’ve been told, a gentle, thoughtful and literate people who laid the foundations of Western civilization, engaging in deep intellectual and artistic conversation as they strolled around the agora in the centre of Athens.

If they needed any help with their public relations in a later, busier and noisier age, they could have called on John Keats in the nineteenth century, with his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, the ‘still unravish’d bride of quietness’.

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ he said, as he gazed in wonder at the handiwork of the Ancient Greek artist, ‘that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’[18] And we finish the poem in a warm, comforting glow, thinking fondly of the sensitive race of men who inspired such moving thoughts.

Well, yes. But the Ancient Greeks also gave us andrapodismos (AND-ra-pod-IS-mos). It’s a word they used to describe what they did sometimes when they conquered a city – killing all the men and selling the women and children into slavery. They weren’t always quite as gentle and cerebral as we like to think.

If you wanted to translate the word into English, then ‘ethnic cleansing’ might be as good a phrase as any with which to start. But andrapodismos is more specific and also less coy. Whereas the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ hides its brutality behind words that might almost suggest a harmless clean-up operation with mops and buckets, andrapodismos is quite clear about what it means. It makes, to use an unfortunate phrase, no bones about its murderous intent.

The historian Thucydides describes a warning in 416BC from the Athenians to the island of Melos in the Cyclades, which had challenged their authority. ‘The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,’ they told them – and then proceeded to prove it with an andrapodismos. Grown men were put to death and women and children sold as slaves, and, a little later, five hundred Athenian colonists arrived to seize the island for themselves.[19] The Melians should have known better: a few years before, Athens had done much the same to the people of Skione, and the Spartans carried out an andrapodismos at the city of Plataea. Philosophical and artistic they may have been, but the Greeks could be as brutal and bloody as any soldier in any war.

Luckily, we don’t often need a word to describe such cold-blooded savagery. We know mass murder when we read about it and, God forbid, see it. And yet it’s still one that would be worth its place in the dictionary, if only because of what it reminds us about the Ancient Greeks and the way we often think about them. This is not to say that they were worse than us – and names like Srebrenica, Rwanda, Islamic State and Cambodia should stifle any tendency towards that sort of complacency – but it does suggest something that we should have known all along. Perhaps they were no better, either.

We often like to believe things that we know aren’t true – standing in a crowded bus or on the Underground with our faces pressed lovingly into a stranger’s armpit, we might entertain wistful thoughts about what a happy life our forefathers must have enjoyed. In the sunny, unstressed, rural days before the industrial revolution, we dream, how they must have relished the summer sun as they worked in the fields by day, sleeping the sleep of the just by night. And then we remember what a cruel life of unrelieved poverty and hard work it must really have been.

It’s easy to forget that humans are complicated creatures and always have been – that those we admire and respect are seldom angels and those we hate are less than the devil. Maybe ‘an andrapodismos moment’ would be a good phrase to describe those occasions when our fantasies bump up inconveniently and painfully against the truth.

Honne & Tatemae (Japanese)

English likes to think of itself as a bluff, honest, John Bull of a language that says what it means and means what it says. Words that suggest that we may tell lies or misrepresent ourselves – ‘hypocritical’, for instance, ‘insincere’, ‘double-dealing’ or ‘duplicitous’ – all leave a sour taste in the mouth. Who wants to be thought a hypocrite?

And yet it doesn’t always reflect the way that we behave. We all occasionally sacrifice the harsh truth in favour of the kinder, gentler, or just the easier thing to say.

Pollsters’ surveys report that voters want one thing – high public spending, perhaps, even with the taxes to pay for it – but they regularly go into the privacy of the polling booth to vote for something completely different. Honesty and straightforwardness sound a much less attractive option to the man faced with the classic question, ‘Does my bum look big in this?’ ‘Delicious,’ we will say to a waiter, before smuggling pieces of inedible gristle into a paper napkin to slip into our pockets.

We have no word to suggest that there may be perfectly honourable reasons for being less than completely truthful – privacy perhaps, or a sense of decency, or an unwillingness to cause hurt. Kindness is a virtue just as much as honesty.

Japanese is possibly the only language with words to describe such behaviour. Honne (HON-NEH) is the way you really feel, the thoughts and feelings that you will only express to your closest confidants. For everyone else, there is tatemae (tat-eh-MY-eh), the face that we show to the public – respectable, polite, cool and revealing nothing about our true feelings. The Japanese business contact to whom you explain your proposals may nod and smile and say ‘Hai, hai,’ – but whatever the Japanese phrasebook may say, the words do not really mean ‘Yes, yes.’ They mean simply, ‘I hear you.’

Honne is to be kept carefully guarded. It might include your deepest dreams and wishes, your personal opinions and, crucially, your real emotions. It would take a long time and a lot of building of trust before foreigners – gaijin or gaikokujin, which literally means ‘outsider people’ – would be likely to share honne.

Learning to understand this difference between honne and tatemae, to adjust your speech to fit the person you are talking to, is one of the key lessons of social etiquette for Japanese children. The distinction runs through Japanese society, from the behaviour of politicians and government officials to relations between business contacts to daily social interactions.

It’s important, too, to recognize how you are being spoken to. An invitation for a meal, for instance, might be tatemae, a purely formal mark of courtesy that is not meant to be taken up. English speakers do much the same thing – ‘We must do lunch,’ they may say, brightly, without intending any such thing – but they have no word to describe what they are doing. It’s not about being deceitful but about not wanting to give offence.

Politeness and courtesy are built into Japanese society, and the distinction between honne and tatemae is also a virtue in its own right. One of the teachings of Confucius is that neither happiness nor anger should be apparent in one’s face, and a traditional Japanese would consider it a shameful breach of good manners to express his true feelings or intentions directly. Such behaviour might be described as baka shoujiki, or honesty to the point of foolishness, and it would be seen as naive, impolite and childish.

So the Japanese, having understood and codified behaviour that the languages of the rest of the world seem to prefer to ignore, must presumably be relaxed and at ease with themselves? Sadly, no. Some social commentators agonize over fears that the rest of the world sees them as dishonest or insincere. So, as foreign travel grows more popular and Western influences increase, Japan might begin to move away from the twin concepts of honne and tatemae. Yet while English speakers value politeness, gentleness and consideration for other people’s feelings just as much as the Japanese, perhaps what’s needed is not for Japan to abandon the words but for them to be adopted into English to describe a practice for which we need feel no embarrassment.

Ubuntu (Bantu)

The music of Beethoven, the poetry of Shakespeare, the paintings of Van Gogh – it seems somehow wrong to think of them as German, English or Dutch. They belong to all of us because they remind us what we are all, as human beings, capable of at the very summit of our potential. And the same is true of the southern African Bantu word ubuntu (u-BUN-tu, where the u sounds are rounded like a Yorkshireman asking for ‘some butter’).

Translated literally, it means the quality of being human – humanity, if you like. But that goes almost nowhere towards explaining the ramifications of what has grown into a cross between a world view, a moral aspiration and a political philosophy in southern Africa. And even that leaves out most of the associations that have grown around the word from the principles of the anti-apartheid movement and the achievements of Nelson Mandela.

When Mandela tried to explain the concept of ubuntu, he used a memory from his childhood of how a traveller reaching a village would never have to ask for food, shelter and entertainment. The villagers would come out and greet him and welcome him as one of them. That, said Mandela, was one aspect of ubuntu. It didn’t mean, he went on, that people should not make the most of their own lives and enrich themselves – the important thing was that they should do so in order to enable the community as a whole to improve.

His colleague in the fight against apartheid, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, also spoke about ubuntu in a speech in 2007.[20] ‘In our culture, there is no such thing as a solitary individual,’ he said. ‘We say, a person is a person through other persons – that we belong in the bundle of life. I want you to be all you can be, because that’s the only way I can be all I can be.’

Ubuntu can also be a personal quality – an individual might be described as ‘having ubuntu’, in which case they have an instinctive awareness of the importance of interdependence. They will stand by their social obligations and be as conscious of their duties as they are of their rights; they will be aware of whatever personal qualities they possess, such as beauty or wisdom, but only in relation to other people. They may be ambitious, as Mandela suggested, but along with that ambition will go a sense that the community as a whole should profit from their advancement.

However, it is as a view of the world, a prescription for how people should behave, that ubuntu is best known. It is a philosophy, not a religion, as it’s occasionally described – there is no supernatural element in it, no aspect of duty towards an all-powerful being, but simply a joyful recognition of the importance of community. It’s important to stress that it is not a matter of unselfishly subjugating one’s personal interests to those of wider society, as a communist might enjoin; rather, ubuntu is all about the development and fulfilment of a person’s potential both as an individual and as part of a community.

In the years leading up to the collapse of apartheid in South Africa in 1994, there was a widespread conviction across the rest of the world that the country was heading for a bloodbath. But though there was violence – sporadic fighting between rival opposition groups, outbreaks of tribal antagonism, the shooting of twenty-nine people by troops in the so-called Ciskei homeland in 1992 and car bombs in Johannesburg – the widely expected wholesale slaughter never happened.

One aspect of ubuntu is that it specifically renounces vengeance. Many leaders of the anti-apartheid movement, Mandela and Tutu among them, believed that freedom would benefit not only blacks but whites as well – freeing the jailer as well as the prisoner. More than twenty years later, South Africa remains a nation beset by problems, but ubuntu – described by President Barack Obama as ‘Mandela’s greatest gift’[21] – is a living tribute to the commitment to a sense of common purpose that transcends politics and race.

You don’t need to be South African or, more specifically, a black South African to appreciate ubuntu. Like Beethoven’s music, Shakespeare’s poetry and Van Gogh’s paintings, it is an inspiring reminder of what we might be capable of at our best.

Insha’allah (Arabic)

There are phrases in several languages that reflect something of the meaning of the Arabic insha’allah (insha-all-AH) – God willing in English, of course, or the Latin deo volente. The Spanish and Portuguese words ojalà and oxalà, with their echo of the Arabic, carry a dim 500-year memory of Moorish rule in Iberia; and the Welsh os mynn duw is a Celtic version of the same idea. But none of them has the same deep, universal resonance of insha’allah.

The word Islam itself means submission – submission to the will of God, that is – and through the whole religion runs a rich vein of fatalism. Nothing, the devout Muslim believes, will happen unless God wishes it to, and so it is sinful to promise anything without acknowledging that only the will of God can bring it about. The precise phrase comes from a verse in the Qur’an, which warns: ‘Never say of anything, “Indeed, I will do that tomorrow,” except [when adding], “If Allah wills [Insha’allah].”’

To that extent, then, the phrase carries with it a sense of the all-pervading influence of religion on a Muslim’s life – a brief prayer inserted into the most mundane of remarks. But it can also be used by the less devout as a way of avoiding responsibility or commitment. If all is in God’s hands, the speaker cannot be held responsible if things go wrong.

If you call on an Arab businessman in his office and his secretary tells you that he will see you later, ‘insha’allah’, then you are in for a long and probably fruitless wait. In this sense, the word might be best translated by the Spanish mañana, which literally means ‘tomorrow’, but more often has a feeling about it of ‘maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, maybe never’. Between those two meanings of insha’allah, between the devout prayer and the smiling brush-off, lies a trap for the incautious non-Muslim.

There is a story of a wise and experienced Western businessman who fell into this trap when visiting a client to get across the message that a bill that had been outstanding for several months might usefully be paid. He was greeted with smiles, coffee and lengthy enquiries about the health of his family, and questions about the bill were brushed away as a mere nothing that should not be allowed to interrupt this pleasant reunion of old friends.

‘It is nothing,’ said the client from behind his large desk, with an expansive wave of his hand. ‘Do not worry about this. The cheque will be signed tomorrow, insha’allah.’

The businessman, who had given up a whole morning to make this visit, and who had hoped to leave with a signed cheque safely in his pocket, was unimpressed. Since it was the man behind the desk, not Allah, who was going to sign the cheque, he suggested pointedly, the matter could be settled even more quickly. Like now.

And suddenly the atmosphere was different. Where there had earlier been warmth and conviviality, there was now icy formality. Instead of a relaxed conversation about an acknowledged debt that was to be paid, there was now a tense and unsmiling exchange about his lack of respect, his apparent frivolity about deeply held religious feelings and the hurt that he had caused.

The matter went no further and – several weeks later – he got his money. But he never forgot the lesson he had learned about the dangers of insha’allah.

Veline (Italian)

It would be a dull old world if everywhere were just the same. What inspires a sharp intake of breath and a sucked-lemon expression in one place is likely to be greeted with whistles of approval, stamping feet and raucous laughter in another.

Take veline (vel-EE-neh), for instance. It’s an old Italian word that, back in mediaeval times, used to mean the fine calfskin on which manuscripts were written – the same stuff that was called vellum in English. From there, it was a short journey to thin paper, and today sheets of tissue paper are referred to as veline. But the word developed another, more specialized, sense. During the last century, it came to be used specifically for the thin sheets of paper on which carbon copies were made – piles of them famously emanated from the offices of the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini, with official statements and decrees.

Then and afterwards, they featured prominently in newsrooms, where multiple copies of stories were rewritten and circulated as they developed. In English, they were called flimsies, which remains a good translation in more ways than one for the way the word veline has evolved in Italian.

The magic of computerization has replaced the endless flow of updates carried by copy-boys, runners or harassed television producers, but back in the 1980s, the Italian television channel Canale 5 launched a satirical, irreverent news programme called Striscia la Notizia. The word notizia means news, and striscia can be either a comic strip or a line of cocaine, which tells you something about the character of the programme. We’re talking a mixture of Mock the Week and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart rather than the evening news. But one of its most notable features was that stories were carried to the newsreader onscreen by slim and sexy young dancers – the veline. The word flimsy was applicable not just to the papers they carried but also to the clothes that they wore.

And that is how the word veline gained its modern meaning. The people who produced Virgil, the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo gave us a new word for half-naked young women dancing across the studio clutching the details of the latest Cabinet appointments or news of the economy. ‘Bimbos’, we might say in English.

But ‘bimbos’ has too much of an air of disapproval to work well as a translation. Bimbo isn’t a word that suggests that a woman might have a university degree or political ambitions. No young woman is going to describe herself as a bimbo, but in Italy the veline developed a culture and a popularity of their own. Under the premiership of Silvio Berlusconi – who owned Canale 5 – several of his personal favourites among the veline without any discernible political experience appeared as candidates for the European Parliament or were appointed to high-profile positions in local and national government. This was the golden age of velinismo, or bimbo-ism.

Before we get too judgemental, perhaps we should remember that in England Page 3 no longer simply means what comes between Page 2 and Page 4. Famous or infamous, depending on your point of view, over the past forty-five years the Sun newspaper’s bare-breasted glamour models have given the phrase ‘Page 3’ a meaning of its own. They also, like the veline, became famous for their pronouncements on the news stories of the day. The British have form when it comes to sexism in advertising and the news media.

However, Page 3 girls, popular as they have been, haven’t yet started appearing on the benches of the House of Commons. The regional Police and Crime Commissioner or the head of the Drinking Water Inspectorate are unlikely to supplement their incomes by leaping around on a television screen in their underwear. Veline is not a word we’re often going to need in English, but it might still be better than the sneering superiority of ‘bimbo’.

Perhaps veline would just sound a little gentler – more relaxed and less critical of the people we’re talking about and how they earn their living. And some of us at least would find that a distinct improvement.

Krengjai (Thai)

In Thailand, a bizarre dance ritual is performed at almost every Western embassy function. The guests arrive – a visiting trade delegation from the UK, perhaps, and a number of potential contacts from the local Thai community – and drinks and canapés are served. And then the conversations start, about business or politics – serious stuff.

The Western guests approach to what feels like a comfortable distance from the Thais and begin to talk; the Thais, embarrassed to have someone standing so unreasonably far away from them, shuffle forward a few inches. The Westerners, puzzled at this advance, retreat away from them, and the Thais, smiling politely but feeling as if they are having a long-distance conversation by loudhailer from one ship to another, advance again. And so it goes on, with little groups of Westerners moving slowly backwards around the room, followed by the earnest and well-meaning Thais.

The problem is simply that neither side appreciates the expectations of the other in relation to their personal space. What seems to someone used to Western drinks parties to be a reasonable distance to stand apart is a peculiar experience for the Thais. Wanting to be friendly and welcoming, they move forward – and so the dance begins. It’s hard to understand local customs that are so deeply ingrained that they are seldom talked about. And so it is with krengjai.

To outsiders, the ancient Thai system of krengjai (kreng-JEYE) may seem to be little more than formalized deference – a stultifying sense of hierarchy that affects every area of life. And it’s true that, traditionally, teachers, parents, company directors, senior police officers and other high-ranking government servants and officials would expect to be treated with respect, homage, reverence and even fear by their juniors. It would be rude and inappropriate to criticize them or even question their decisions – and extremely unfriendly to stand so far away from them while they had a conversation. But that is only a small part of krengjai.

Sometimes it’s translated as consideration, but that is a feeble echo of the way the word resonates in Thailand. To a Thai, krengjai is an all-embracing concern to demonstrate awareness of other people’s feelings, to show them politeness and respect and never to make them lose face. The word literally means ‘respect-heart’, and it involves not just surface courtesy or deference but a deeply felt desire to make people feel comfortable and at ease.

Foreign tourists sometimes claim that if you ask a Thai a direct question – ‘Is this the bus for Phuket?’ for instance – he will be unwilling because of krengjai to disappoint you by saying no. The safest way to find out if it is the bus for Phuket, the story goes, is to ask where it is bound, without giving a hint of where you want to go. Similarly, tradesmen may agree to appointments that they have no intention of keeping, just to avoid the embarrassment of a refusal. These examples are a misunderstanding of a feeling that reflects Buddhist ideas that one should not seek fulfilment for oneself but concentrate on achieving happiness for others. In Thailand, thoughtlessness, selfishness or unkindness are deep and lasting disgraces.

Understanding the way other people see the world is one of those things, like playing with your children, watching the sun set, or smiling, that are simple, unalloyed good and positive things to do. Perhaps having the word krengjai in English could help to achieve that understanding in some small way. If it did, it would certainly make the world a happier place.

Inat (Serbian)

Back in 1999, when NATO’s bombs were showering down on Belgrade, the Serbian word inat (EE-nat) became a favourite of Western journalists trying to explain the frustrating refusal of the Serb inhabitants to do what was obviously in their best interests and surrender. Civilians were walking the streets with paper targets pinned to their chests in a ‘Come and ’ave a go if you think you’re ’ard enough’ challenge to the pilots thousands of feet above them. One report described a Serb fighter boasting about how he would tackle the bombers with his pistol. Runners in the Belgrade marathon dodged potholes as they ran past the ruined buildings of the city, determined to finish the race, bombs or no bombs.

It was, journalists suggested, all down to inat – a word inherited from Turkish after centuries of Ottoman occupation, which means spite or stubbornness. But, as they were keen to explain, it means a lot more than that as well.

Inat has a sense of having your back to the wall, of being determined not to do what is asked of you. Inat suggests you are ready to cut off your nose to spite your face, and your ears and lips as well, if that will make your point. It’s an absolute refusal to countenance surrender. If chivalry, gallantry and all the panoply of military virtues traditionally belong to the wealthy and privileged, then perhaps inat is a stolidly peasant expression of stoic courage.

It would be a mistake to see it as an emotion that is only expressed in wartime. A schoolboy being bullied who turns to face his attackers, ready to be beaten up but not to do whatever it is that they want from him, is driven by inat. So is the worker who is pushed too far by an overbearing boss and finally tells him in no uncertain terms exactly where he can stick his job. So is the driver in a narrow lane who refuses to reverse out of the way of another car, because he reckons that he was there first. Later, as they mop their bloody nose, clear their desk or inspect the scratches on their car, they may well feel a twinge of regret, but there will always be a defiant little bit of them feeling that they did what had to be done.

In a war, though, inat really comes into its own, and it is seized upon by governments who have little else to offer their people. As the bombs fell on Belgrade in 1999, the inat of the people fed into the story of a defiantly Christian race under attack down the centuries from a succession of powerful and brutal outside forces, and so it conveniently stilled the voices that might otherwise have been heard from civilians demanding how the hell the government had got them into this mess. A lot of people thought at the time that the strongly nationalist government of President Slobodan Milosevic was quietly encouraging this upsurge of inat as a specifically Serbian unifying force of national pride.

Inat, in fact, can be a dangerous hard drug for a government to feed its people, building up a feeling of persecution, a resentment of outsiders and a sense that it is us against the world – catnip for potentially violent nationalists.

In 1999, there was nothing specifically Serb about either the emotion or the government’s exploitation of it. For people anywhere in the world sitting terrified under a modern bombardment of high explosives, fire and shards of red-hot metal, the only realistic alternatives are probably blind panic and a dogged stubbornness that takes no account of life or death but is just determined not to give in. Much the same feelings were encouraged, for much the same reasons of fostering implacable and defiant nationalism and improving morale, in the London of 1940, when the battered inhabitants looked out on the devastation of the Blitz and snarled, at least according to a government propaganda film, ‘We can take it.’ In fact, the most famous expression of inat is in English, not Serbian: ‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender …’

The British government of 1940, like their Serbian counterparts nearly sixty years later, knew how effective inat could be at improving morale among a battered and frightened population. The thing about hard drugs, whether fed from a syringe or from a politician speaking over the radio, is that they may be dangerous when abused but they are very effective indeed when the patient is in real and mortal danger.

Muruwah (Arabic)

Wilfred Thesiger, the great Arabian traveller of the twentieth century, was constantly astounded by the generosity of the tribesmen who were his hosts and guides on his journeys across the Arabian Desert. Theirs, he said many years after his travels were over, was the only society in which he had found true nobility.

But one incident above all gave him an insight into the traditional values by which the Arabs set such store. He and his companions were joined at their camp one night by a skinny old man in a tattered and grubby loincloth, who sat down to eat with them. Thesiger was astonished at the warmth of the welcome extended to the old man by the tribesmen.

He was, one of his guides explained, a man who was known far and wide for his generosity. Thesiger was not surprised by much about the Arabs, but he looked at the old man quizzically – the bones visible beneath the skin on his half-starved body, the broken sheath of his old dagger, the clear signs of grinding poverty – and he wondered what on earth the man could have to be generous with.

His companion shook his head. This, he explained, had once been the richest man of his tribe, but now his goats and his camels were gone. He had nothing. What had happened, asked Thesiger, still not understanding. Disease? Raiders? No, came the reply. He had given them all away, killing his last animals to feed strangers he had met in the desert. He was ruined by his own generosity.

‘By God, he is generous,’ the tribesman said with envy in his voice, and Thesiger finally understood.

The quality the old man possessed was muruwah. It is usually translated as ‘manliness’ – a term with all sorts of cultural connotations. For us, manliness might imply a collection of adjectives such as virile, strong, vigorous and hardy, but for the Arabs, scraping a meagre living in harsh and ever-threatening conditions, it carried those meanings and far more besides. It celebrated the virtues of the desert – courage, patience and endurance – and an acceptance that the individual would sacrifice his own interests for those of the community as a whole. There was an unquestioning loyalty to the sheikh and the elders of the tribe: to ensure survival, muruwah (moo-ROO-ah, where the first is as in book, the second as in cool) had to be essentially a communal rather than an individual virtue.

It could be brutal – within the tribe, it led to an implacable adherence to traditional eye-for-an-eye justice. If a member of the tribe killed a man’s camel, then his own camel would be forfeit; in a society without locks, the few possessions the tribesmen owned had to be protected with an iron law. And it went further: if someone killed a man’s son, then his own child would be put to death as well. Towards those outside the tribe, it would mean at the very best a guarded hostility: muruwah meant that the tribesman would be ready to avenge any insult or aggression from another tribe with immediate armed retaliation.

But it embraced, too, a wholehearted generosity – a quality that was needed where there was never enough of anything. Providing food and shelter for the stranger was a matter of honour for the tribe and the individual alike; there was an instinctive egalitarianism that meant that the old, the young and the sick would be protected for as long as they could be without endangering the survival of the tribe as a whole.

For centuries, muruwah was the only way to maintain some sort of social order among the chaos of warring tribes. It was a chivalric code of honour that dated back well before the time of Mohammed and the dawn of Islam, and, as Thesiger found, it lasted well into the twentieth century.

Taken away from its birthplace, perhaps the complexity of qualities that muruwah entailed is less easy to understand – in the Arabian desert, shortage of food meant that you starved, while for most people in today’s developed world it probably means that you’ve forgotten to go to the supermarket.

But not for everyone. Even in today’s wealthy countries within Europe and in the US there are people without enough to eat, and across the wider world the problem of hunger and famine is always with us. If we had a word for manliness that included an idea of generosity and social responsibility it might just encourage us to act accordingly.

Philotimo (Greek)

We all like to feel special – even unique. Jews are the Chosen People; Britain (or maybe England, or possibly the United Kingdom – the details are a little vague) is the Mother of the Free, whom God made mighty and whose bounds shall be set ‘wider still and wider’; the United States of America is the Land of Opportunity. And philotimo is the unique birthright of the Greeks.

Philotimo (fill-oh-TEEM-oh) means, literally, ‘the love of honour’ – to which rather grandiose phrase William Shakespeare’s Falstaff might unheroically reply, ‘What is honour? A word. What is in that word honour? What is that honour? Air.’[22] Those lines might not go down too well in Greece, as philotimo is a quality that many Greeks might say lies at the heart of who they are.

Thales of Miletus, one of the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece, observed in the early sixth century BC that philotimo came naturally to the Greeks. It was, he said, like breathing. ‘A Greek is not a Greek without it. He might as well not be alive.’ It is a quality that the Greeks frequently claim even today – a way of identifying their modern way of life with the glories of Classical Greece. And it is a mistake to be too cynical about it – philotimo is the quality that is often ascribed to the Greek partisans of the Second World War who risked the firing squad to help Allied servicemen and to join the resistance against the Nazi occupation. For them, it was much more than a fine word. The reply to Falstaff might be that honour, in their case, involved personal pride, honesty, courage and a passionate sense of freedom coupled with a deeply felt patriotism.

But these qualities, central to philotimo, don’t tell the whole story. Over the centuries, it has come to represent a number of virtues that are seen as typically Greek – not just generosity but also appreciation of the generosity of others; not just love for your family but delight in their love for you; not just freedom but a sense of the limits placed on your freedom by your own instinct for what is right. In particular, it involves an understanding of the right way to behave in your relationships with others, whether within your own family or in wider society. Philotimo brings together the private individual and the public man.

The trouble is that these virtues, which describe the qualities that make an ideal man or woman, are universal – there can be few nations in the world that have not, at some time or other, claimed them as their own. In his first letter to the Thessalonians, the people of Thessalonica, St Paul urged them to live their lives with philotimo – a message that was passed on through the Bible to all the people of Christendom. The Greeks may not have a monopoly on the virtues, but they do have the only word to describe them. We can’t all be Greeks, but we can all achieve philotimo.