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.
Nuts and Bolts
Fartlek
(Swedish)
Alternating fast and slow running
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)
To solve a practical problem using only the materials to hand
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?