Tassa
(Swedish)
A silent, cautious, prowling walk – like that of a cat
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)
A pile of books waiting to be read
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.
Only Human After All
Shemomechama
(Georgian)
The embarrassing sudden realization that, somehow, you’ve eaten it all …
In English, we have words and we put them together to form a sentence. There can be very short sentences – ‘I ran’, say, or ‘I slept’. But the shortness of these sentences is a result of their simplicity, not the cleverness of the words themselves. In Georgia, they do things differently. They can tell a whole story, all in a single word.
Shemomechama (shem-o-meh-DJAHM-uh) means ‘I didn’t mean to, but I suddenly found I had eaten all of it.’ It may not be an entirely convincing plea from a small boy standing in front of you with an empty plate and a guilty expression, but it’s an impressively complex idea to get across in a single word.
They can manage it largely because Georgian – one of a small group of languages in the Caucasus, with its own delicate and elegant script – has a number of varied and expressive prefixes, which can add subtle shades of meaning to the most simple verbs. So in this case, the mechama part of the word means ‘I had eaten’, but the shemo prefix combines an expression of desire, a reluctance to fulfil that desire and then a slightly shame-faced, shoulder-shrugging admission that temptation was too great.
Not even the Georgians can squeeze into that word a full explanation for why you’ve been so weak – maybe the food was particularly tasty, maybe you were unbearably hungry, or maybe you just kept nibbling away with your mind on other things and suddenly discovered to your horror that you’d eaten the lot. But that probably doesn’t matter – trying to come up with a reason isn’t going to make it any better as an excuse. Whoever you’re telling is still going to be pretty cross, although probably not as cross as in two other examples of the same prefix at work.