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

Fartlek (Swedish)

It’s not much of a secret. Inside each one of us, hidden deep in the recesses of our inner psyche, is an eight-year-old child trying to get out. He or she isn’t altogether happy with all that adult stuff, like jobs, ambition and politics, which seems to fill so much of our lives. What this inner child likes is fun, laughter, chocolate biscuits and an occasional guilty snigger at something that seems rather harmlessly grubby.

Every now and then, that inner eight-year-old needs to be let out to play. And this is where the Swedish word fartlek (FART-laik) comes in. It literally means ‘speed-play’ and describes a type of athletics training devised in the 1930s in which periods of fast and slow running are intermingled. It doesn’t take much to imagine organized lines of unsmiling, blond-bearded Swedish athletes conscientiously counting their paces as they jog and then sprint and then jog again up and down snow-covered Swedish mountains with unpronounceable names, but it’s those first four letters that give fartlek its shame-faced appeal in English.

It’s a word that can’t be spoken without giving that inner eight-year-old, who is generally kept so carefully hidden, the opportunity for a vulgar snigger. But there’s more to fartlek than that. Words remind us of our history – the k and the gh in knight are distant echoes of the Anglo-Saxon pronunciation, and the Hindi roots of bungalow are a memory of the British Raj in India. Similarly, fartlek invokes the past in a very direct way, taking us a great deal further back than the memory of our eight-year-old selves. If the fart part gives us a cheap laugh, the lek part carries a hidden reminder to English speakers of their Norse heritage.

Lek survives – just – in Yorkshire dialect, where it means play, just as it does in Swedish. It has survived from the Old Norse of the Vikings for more than a thousand years, lurking on the borders of English ever since the raiders swarmed ashore, raping and pillaging and spreading carnage and chaos across the land. If we were ever to allow the little twist of Viking DNA that’s buried in our genome to clap on its horned helmet, grab its battleaxe and rampage through our quiet streets, we would end up at the very least in the magistrates’ court. We’re not going to seize a bullock from a field and carry it off to roast over an open fire, washed down with flagons of fiery alcohol drunk from a human skull. We’re not going to leap out of the car and hack down the traffic lights that seem to have been holding us up for ever. We’re not going to fly with whirling axe and savage war cry at the annoying little man who tells us to keep off the grass. But it’s good to be reminded by that one little word that those things are there in our DNA, just waiting to be let out. We could if we wanted to.

A case might be made for adopting fartlek into English because it could be useful to have a word that describes a mixture of running and walking – hurrying for a bus, for instance, when you’re not fit enough to sprint all the way to the bus stop, and, anyway, you’re carrying heavy shopping. But the real reason is much simpler. It reminds us, in two very different ways, of who we used to be.

Desenrascanço (Portuguese)

It’s probably one of the most important skills a person can learn and yet there is no satisfactory word for it in English.

The Portuguese speak of desenrascanço (d’AYS-en-ras-CAN-sauo), which literally means ‘disentanglement’ but is used to describe the ability to put together a last-minute, emergency solution to a problem by using the materials that happen to be available. It may not last, you may well not be using the various component parts of the solution in accordance with the manufacturers’ instructions, and don’t even mention health and safety, but whatever idea it is that you’ve cobbled together will at least get you home. Probably.

You are driving home late at night, and you hear an ominous metallic crash from the back of the car, immediately followed by a scraping sound, possibly with a glimpse of sparks flying up off the road flashing into your rear-view mirror. The exhaust pipe that you have been meaning to fix for weeks has finally come adrift, and you are stranded.

If you are the sort of English speaker who lives life according to a series of instructions, such as ‘Be Prepared’ or ‘Fail to prepare, prepare to fail’, rather than the concept of desenrascanço, then this doesn’t apply to you. You will have had the exhaust fixed in the first place, or at the very least you will have had the foresight to pack a complete tool kit, together with a pair of overalls, safely in the back of the car. If, on the other hand, you are like most people, you will call out a breakdown service and sit for an hour and a half in the cold while they try to find you.

But if you are Portuguese, you will take off your leather belt, wrap it around the exhaust pipe and fiddle it through the exhaust bracket or some other convenient part of the underside of your car. As you drive home, you can mentally pat yourself on the back and ponder on the meaning of desenrascanço.

It’s not limited to cars. Desenrascanço can be applied to problems with your computer, with household equipment, gardening tools or anything else that can go wrong. You can use it to recover lost keys from a drain or replace vital items of equipment. Some people might even try it, optimistically, when attempting to save faltering relationships.

It involves inventiveness, imagination and flexibility, as well as the sort of confidence that believes there is no practical problem in the word that cannot be solved with a wire coat hanger, a piece of string, a little bit of sticky tape and a lot of ingenuity. An unwillingness to spend money is also an advantage – one thing that skilled practitioners of desenrascanço have in common is an expression of horrified disbelief when they see the price of manufacturers’ spare parts or skilled repairmen.

There is, however, a significant disadvantage to the whole idea. If you are less than proficient in the necessary skill, or a little clumsy with your hands, your repair will go wrong and some smart Alec will tell you that whatever it is you’ve been fixing is farpotshket. You will then end up having to pay someone to do the job properly, and it will cost you much more time and money than if you’d got help in the first place. Sound familiar?

Lagom (Swedish)

In recent British politics, one phrase has been overused to such an extent that people have started to scream in anger at the television screen or the radio, perhaps even the printed page, whenever they hear it.

It doesn’t matter which political party is speaking. Every revamped policy, every change in taxation rates, every new benefit proposal, every fresh idea, has been aimed at the ‘hard-working family’. It seems to have been generally agreed among political speechwriters that everyone who is anyone wants to work hard to get ahead and achieve a better life for their family. Americans, in the same way, never tire of telling you that anyone, however poor their birth, can achieve staggering, limitless, mind-blowing wealth. Yachts, mansions, private jets, swimming pools and an annual income equivalent to the GDP of a medium-sized nation – they are all up for grabs, with a bit of hard work. That, they insist, is not a myth but the American Dream.

It’s very likely that most Swedes wouldn’t understand. Like everyone else, they see the virtue of hard work and appreciate the benefits of ambition, but the Swedes also see that scrabbling as fast as you can for money and advancement has a downside. Not only are you likely to trample on other people as you elbow your way up, you also tend to miss out on a lot of things like time with your family, relationships, reading a book or just sitting smelling the flowers. The word that most Swedes would choose to sum up their attitude to life would be lagom (la-GOHM).

Lagom is used to express satisfaction, and if you ask a group of Swedes for a word that encapsulates the essence of living in Sweden, that’s the one they would probably choose. It means just right, not too much or too little – but without the rather grudging air of ‘satisfactory’ or ‘sufficient’ in English. How are you? Lagom. Is your coffee hot enough? Lagom. How’s the weather? Lagom. Someone’s height may be lagom, so may the number of people at a party.

It’s a positive word, and many Swedes would extend its use from the expression of satisfaction with the amount of food on their plate to describing the nature of Sweden’s politics. It’s a social democratic, middle-of-the-road country where taxes are high and people might find it hard to get rich, but where everyone is looked after and life is … well, lagom. It means equality and fairness: there is enough for everyone.

Work–life balance is important to the Swedes. Whereas in the City of London or on Wall Street, burned-out executives are reputed to leave jackets over their chairs when they stagger home after a sixteen-hour day so that people will think they’ve just slipped out for a moment and are still working at their desks, in Stockholm that would simply cause bemusement. If you have to work such long hours, it means that you’ve planned your work badly, they would think. Your career, too, should be lagom.

Clearly they’re doing something right, because Sweden always figures at or around the top of the league tables that are produced periodically, setting out the countries where people are happiest and most content. And in London, too, perhaps there seems to be a shift of emphasis away from chasing the last commission and towards aiming to be home in time to put the children to bed. Younger people are less ready to sell themselves body and soul to the company in the way that their parents’ generation did.

So maybe lagom is a word that the English language is waiting for. Would it be a good thing to have it in the dictionary? Well, not too good, not too bad. Just lagom.

Epibreren (Dutch)

Technology, as we all know, makes simple things more complicated.

In big bureaucracies like the Civil Service, the EU or the BBC, all you once needed to get to the top were brackets after your job title and a clipboard – the brackets to prove you were important, and the clipboard to prove you were busy.

The brackets were the most important part of your official role. If you were a simple News Editor at the BBC, you were expected to perform some comparatively menial task such as editing news. If your title was Editor (News), then the brackets told the world that you were a person of substance, who would be involved in strategic blue-sky thinking, analysis and inter-departmental relations, rather than actually doing anything. You would no more dream of editing news than you would of washing up the coffee cups. You have to be important before you can be successful.

But even though you avoided doing anything, you had to look busy. You had to give the appearance of being proactive and decisive as you strode confidently down the corridor from the morning medium-term forward planning symposium to the Performance Analysis Unit. Nothing was better for that than being armed with a clipboard. You could stop and make notes on it occasionally, but the clipboard itself would do the trick.

But now clipboards belong in a museum. They’ve been replaced by tablet computers and smart phones – and since everyone has those, and no one can tell whether you are devising strategically vital spreadsheets on them or checking your Facebook page, they’re no use at all for making you look important.

What you need these days is epibreren.

Epibreren (ep-i-BREER-un) is a Dutch word originally coined by the newspaper columnist Simon Carmiggelt, and it means – well, it means nothing at all. That is the beauty of it. Carmiggelt claimed in one of his columns that the word had been revealed to him in 1953 by a civil servant from whom he had requested some papers. The papers, said the civil servant, still needed epibreren. Intrigued, Carmiggelt asked what epibreren meant, and the civil servant eventually confessed that it had no meaning. It was a word he had made up to fend off enquiries.

The story is almost certainly just that – a story. Carmiggelt was a talented columnist with a column to fill. But the word epibreren survived and has come to refer to unspecified activities that sound as though they might be important but don’t actually amount to anything. In short, it’s a catch-all excuse for inaction, laziness or inefficiency, which also manages to make the speaker sound rather grand. The theory is that people never like to admit that they don’t understand what someone has said, so if the excuse is given with sufficient confidence and in crisp efficient tones which suggest that the speaker has very important things that he or she has to be getting on with, it’s likely to be accepted. But it’s more than just an excuse – not only does it fob off enquiries, it also makes you look like a person of stature, someone at the top of the food chain. It’s the verbal equivalent of the once-ubiquitous clipboard.

We’re much less subtle in English. Our excuses, such as ‘The cheque is in the post’ or ‘My computer has gone down’, are so crude that they generally aren’t even meant to be believed. ‘The dog ate my homework.’ The problem with them is they indicate an acceptance that something is wrong, even though they pass the blame on to someone or something else. The beauty of epibreren is that it reflects the fault back on to the complainer – ‘Can’t you understand how important this is?’ it seems to say. ‘How could you be so inconsiderate as to waste my valuable time with these petty questions?’ It has just the sort of empty, airy superiority that a senior executive needs.

Perhaps we could adapt the word to describe all vacuous attempts to avoid responsibility? Who knows, in a few years’ time, most big bureaucracies could even have a Department of Epibreren. And the head of department will be referred to as Senior Executive (Epibreren) – don’t forget those brackets.

Poronkusema (Finnish)

If you have any idea what a rod, pole or perch is, the chances are that you are English and over fifty years of age. If you’re a little younger – especially if you are interested in horse racing – you might do better with a furlong, while a cricketer might be able to advise you about a chain. And most people could probably manage to describe an acre, even though they might not be too sure how big it was.

They’re all old units of measurement that date back to the centuries before anyone thought of measuring how far it is from the equator to the North Pole, dividing the answer by ten million and calling the result a metre. They belong to an older, slower and less accurate age when measurements related to the way that people lived their lives, rather than to abstract calculations performed in laboratories by scientists in white coats. They all go back to the mediaeval ploughman driving his oxen over the field.

The team was expected to plod on ploughing its furrow until it had to rest – a distance that was reckoned to be about 220 yards (just over 200 metres) and which therefore became known as a furrowlong, or furlong. The stick with which the ploughman controlled the oxen had to be five and a half yards long (just over five metres) to reach the front pair – one rod long. Put four of those rods end to end and you reach the width of the area that the team aimed to plough in a day. That distance became known as a chain in the seventeenth century, when surveyors started to use chains as the most accurate way to measure it, and survives as the length of a cricket pitch. Multiply the length of a furrow (220 yards) by a chain (22 yards), and you have an acre (4,840 square yards), the area a team was expected to plough in day. Do the maths and marvel.

It all sounds complicated and slightly arbitrary today, but it wouldn’t have done in the times when men went out to plough the fields every day. Then, the units would have chimed with the way they lived their lives. And the same was true for the herdsmen who drove reindeer across the wastes of northern Finland. Their unit of measurement was even more down to earth.

A poronkusema (por-on-koo-SAY-mah) was the distance that a reindeer was believed to be capable of travelling without stopping for a pee. If you’re interested – and if you were herding the animals, you would be – it’s about 7.5 kilometres. It was in official use as a measurement of distance until metrication in the late nineteenth century.

It’s unlikely, in the twenty-first century, we’re ever going to need to know the distance that we can drive a reindeer along a motorway until we need a reindeer service station. The poronkusema is obsolete in more ways than one. But perhaps it’s worth a new lease of life as a way of describing something like a typewriter or those dusty antique farm-workers’ tools that you sometimes see hanging on the walls of country pubs – something that is old and outdated, it’s true, but which reminds us nostalgically of past times.

Farpotshket (Yiddish)

It may seem hard for anyone under fifty to believe, but there was a day when an ordinary person could open the bonnet of a car and have at least a sporting chance of understanding what they found there. They could fiddle with the engine, tweak it a bit, even fix it when it went wrong. Not today, of course – everything is governed by a computer that can only be reset by a piece of equipment that costs a fortune and needs a graduate in electronic engineering to make it work.

You could drive a car on which the clutch linkage was made out of a twisted wire coat hanger, or use a pair of tights as a fan belt (while hoping your mother didn’t miss them). You might even have broken an egg into the radiator in an attempt to fix a water leak. But those are far-off golden days, when the summers were warmer and the chocolate bars bigger and tastier. And the memories of how we used to raise the car’s bonnet and work magic with the engine are a little rose-tinted, too.

The description that comes to mind for these attempted running repairs is not do-it-yourself wizard or ad hoc genius but farpotshket.

Try as you might to pretend differently, not only did these fixes not work (except for the coat hanger and the clutch – that modification could be carried out by an expert and the car would work for years), they ended in disaster. Farpotshket (fahr-POTS-SKEHT) is a Yiddish word which describes something that is irreparably damaged as a result of ham-fisted attempts to mend it.

It’s the second part of that definition that makes the word such a delight. It’s not just that it doesn’t work – that would be bad enough but easily described with the American military acronym SNAFU (Situation Normal: All – umm – Fouled Up). The point about something being farpotshket is that you messed it up yourself, or you trusted someone else to do it and they messed it up for you. There is something hair-tearingly infuriating about it – the word carries with it just an echo of the superior sniggering of the experts who could have done it all so much better, if only you’d paid them. But more than anything, it comes with the resigned shrugged shoulder of a person who knows that he should have known better. It was never going to work.

It has an associated verb that is almost as expressive – potshky (POTs-ski) is to fiddle with something in a well-meaning and purposeful way but with a complete lack of competence. You can potshky with anything – cars and other machines, of course, but also with intangible things like diary arrangements, things you have written, or even relationships. What they have in common is that once you have potshky-ed with them, they will collapse in disarray. And it will all be your own fault.

Cars, computers, electronic devices – the relevance of farpotshket to daily life today is obvious. ‘It looks simple enough – that little wire seems to have come adrift. If I just connect it there …’ BANG! And then you call the helpline and a concerned voice on the other side of the world says, ‘Well, as long as you didn’t … Oh, that is what you did. Well, it’s farpotshket then.’ Or at least they would if we could say that in English.

Tassa (Swedish)

Cats, for all the pictures on the Internet showing them looking cute with ribbons around their necks and peering winningly over the edge of a cardboard box, are carefully designed killing machines. The merciless green eyes give nothing away; the claws that can rip off a mouse’s head with a single flick are delicately sheathed out of sight in those silky soft paws; and the creature proceeds stealthily, one foot placed precisely in front of another, as it makes its silky, sinuous way towards its prey.

It’s a way of moving that we sometimes try to emulate, perhaps in order to avoid waking someone up or disturbing them while they are concentrating or listening to music. Perhaps, if we are of a particularly infantile turn of mind, we simply want to creep up behind them and say ‘Boo’.

We might tiptoe, but we might also put our heel to the ground first and then carefully roll down the outside of our foot until our weight is on the ball of the foot, walking silently like a moccasin-clad Native American making his way through the forest. And the reason that this way of walking has to be so carefully described is that we simply don’t have a word for it.

Or at least we do, but we use it differently – ‘pussyfooting’ would be an ideal word to describe walking like a cat, but we’ve invested that with its own incongruous meaning. You can’t imagine a cat ‘pussyfooting’ around its prey. Delicate and infinitely cautious they may be, but when they are hunting they move straight towards their dinner.

The Swedes have a much better word. Tass (TASS) is an animal’s paw and tassa (tas-SAH) is the verb meaning to walk silently and delicately, like an animal. It is quite distinct from either ‘tiptoe’ or ‘pad’ – the two words in English that might be used most commonly to translate it. Tiptoeing, by contrast, sounds crude and clunky. The noun ‘pad’ – meaning the sole of an animal’s foot, which we turn into a verb in order to say ‘padding around’ – has none of the sense of silence, caution and deliberation that tassa carries with it. It’s partly the sound of the word – that double-s in the middle has the effect of a finger to the lips and a quiet ‘sshhh!’

But it’s not only about silence – it’s about control. When a cat puts its foot to the ground, it instinctively checks the firmness beneath before it transfers its weight. It could, if it needed to, lift the foot again without losing its balance. Only the muscles needed for movement are under any tension – the rest of the animal’s body is relaxed and at ease. There is a subtle muscular control that, for a human, would be almost reminiscent of the flowing Chinese martial art of tai chi. Tassa is to move like that – silently, with liquid grace and total control.

It’s never going to be a common word – it has a specialized and very precise meaning. Tassa is not the way we move around every day. It is never going to be used to describe how we walk to the pub or carry the rubbish out to the bins. But as we creep upstairs late at night, or try not to wake the baby, or avoid disturbing the teenager at her homework, tassa is the word that should be on our mind.

Tsundoku (Japanese)

Book lovers all have the same guilty secret. And they all dread the same question when people see their collection of books.

‘So have you read them all?’

It’s a perfectly civil question and quite flattering, since it suggests that all the information, knowledge and wisdom distilled in the pages on your shelves might just be replicated in your brain, but it makes most booklovers quail. Because the honest answer, for most of us, is ‘No’.

How can you explain about the book that you bought when you were passionately interested in a particular subject, only to find when you got it home that it was as dull as last month’s newspaper? Or the ones that you snapped up on a whim in the bookshop because their covers looked so appealing? Or the ones – a growing number as you get older – that you might possibly have read years ago, if only you could now remember the tiniest hint of what they contain. Or the ones you were given as presents, which you never much liked from the moment you opened the parcel. When the excuses run out, the answer is the same.

There are books on our shelves that we haven’t read.

We will read them one day, we tell ourselves with the best of intentions, and so we keep them in convenient piles around the room or next to our bed. When we have time, we say, or we promise ourselves a few days off, or we keep a pile ready for our summer holiday and another for when we wake in the night. But somehow, inexplicably, the piles just keep growing.

This practice, as the Japanese will tell you, is tsundoku (TSOON-do-coo). It literally means ‘reading pile’, but it’s used to describe the act of piling up books and leaving them unread around your house. To those not infected with the book-collecting bug, the tottering and apparently random piles may seem to be nothing but an unsightly mess, but the dedicated practitioner of tsundoku will know where each book is as clearly as if they were catalogued by computer.

You could expand the word’s meaning to cover any of the pleasant actions that we mean to take one day – the visits to old friends, the things we’re going to buy, the holidays in exotic countries. They’re not something to beat ourselves up about, because piling up treats to fill the future is one of the best things about being alive. There is no shame in those piles of books that you will read – perhaps – when you have the chance.

If we had no tsundoku in our lives, it would indeed be a bleak and cheerless world.