The first, shemomelakha (shem-o-meh-LAKH-uh), is the sort of thing you might say to the magistrate. It means, worryingly, ‘I only meant to rough him up a little, but I somehow found I had beaten him half to death.’ And the second, which could also get you into serious trouble, is shemometqvna (shem-o-meh-TKV’N-uh), which is not used in polite society and means something like ‘I was only thinking of a quick kiss and cuddle to begin with, but I somehow ended up … Well, the flesh is weak.’
Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, invented the term ‘portmanteau word’ to describe the idea of two meanings packed into a single word, like the two halves of a large suitcase. To carry on the metaphor, shemo is not even a word in its own right but deserves to be thought of as a whole matched set of luggage. It is a triumph of compression.
English speakers are unlikely to get their tongues round the complexities of shemomechama – and, incidentally, if you think that Georgian is hard to pronounce, you should see the script. (The Romans, who knew a thing or two about empires and foreign cultures, wrote the language off as incomprehensible.) But with due apologies for butchering their language, we might borrow the prefix and use it on its own, to mean ‘I didn’t meant to, but somehow it just happened …’ – whatever ‘it’ might be.
‘Did you realize that you were doing 40 mph in a 30 mph zone, madam?’ And the reply is a guilty shake of the head and a muttered, ‘Shemo.’
‘You said you were going to be home by seven, and it’s nearly three in the morning!’ How did that happen? ‘Shemo.’
Tartle
(Scots)
Social faux pas of forgetting the name of the person you’re introducing
No doubt someone, somewhere, thought years ago that they were doing the world a favour when they invented the name badge that people could wear at conferences or parties. Not only will it simplify introductions, they must have thought, it will also save the embarrassment of forgetting somebody’s name.
The problem is that the people most likely to forget names are those who are middle-aged or more, and they are also the most likely to be short-sighted. The embarrassment caused by having to lean forwards and peer at a woman’s chest, in particular, is far worse than an honest admission that you’ve forgotten her name. Better by far, the Scots might say, to tartle (TAR-tll).
Tartle originally meant to hesitate nervously, whether in meeting someone, failing to reach a business deal, or simply backing away from anything unusual, as a horse might. From that, it has developed to refer specifically to that horrifying moment when you are halfway through an introduction and forget the name of the person you are introducing. Perhaps you may remember only their first name, perhaps only their second, perhaps only a nickname, but whichever it is you are caught with a stupid smile on your face and nothing coming out of your mouth except a stream of unedifying ers and umms. You are tartling.
The word can be either a verb – ‘I was just introducing her when I tartled’ – or a noun – ‘Please forgive my tartle.’ Either way, it’s a light-hearted and jovial way of describing an excruciating social moment.
If we are going to incorporate tartle into the English language, there’s no reason why we should restrict the definition to the specific meaning that the Scots have given it. As we get older, many of us succumb to what we like to call ‘senior moments’ – we start to talk about a certain film star, singer or politician and find halfway through the sentence that we’ve forgotten their name. We say, incautiously, that there are three reasons for something and then start to list them – knowing, deep down in our soul, that after the second one our mind will go blank. We go into a room and then stand there bemused for a few seconds while we try to remember what we came in for.
All of these moments are different forms of tartles. If we could name them with a word a little more dignified than the twee ‘senior moment’, perhaps we would find them easier to face. If you’re under thirty and can’t see why on earth we would need a word like tartle, just wait a few years.
Amae
(Japanese)
Behaving in an endearingly helpless way that encourages other people to want to take care of you
So you’re in your thirties – successful and making a name for yourself in your career. People at work want to know your opinion. When you say something, they listen. You are a pretty big cheese, although you would never say so yourself.
But when you travel home to see your parents, you expect the special dinner you always enjoyed as a child – and you’ll let your mother see how disappointed you are if it’s not on the table. You want to sleep in your own room, where the books that saw you through adolescence are still on the shelves. If you think you can get away with it, perhaps you’ll take your washing home – and of course you can get away with it because your mother will not only wash it but also iron it, fold it and put it carefully back in your overnight bag for you.
You are suffering from a serious dose of amae.
Amae (ahm-EYE) is a Japanese word popularized by the psychoanalyst Takeo Doi in his book The Anatomy of Dependence, which was published in Japan in the 1970s. It describes a type of behaviour which he claimed was particularly prevalent among the Japanese but which many Westerners will recognize in their friends. Some may also see it in themselves and feel a little embarrassed about it, but it’s a word that’s normally applied to other people. It refers to a tendency to curry favour or induce affection by behaving in a way that encourages other people to take care of you, and its commonest form is to continue to act like a child in dealings with your parents. Such as demanding your special meal or taking your washing home.
The parent–child relationship is for many people a model for the way they behave throughout their lives, but it’s not the only place where amae shows itself. There are all sorts of ways in which people carry out amae in their working lives and in their wider personal relations. Usually it appears in a relationship between someone junior and someone senior in the workplace, or between someone younger and someone older in a social setting.
But that’s not always the case. Often, it shows itself in a claimed weakness or incapacity – the woman who ‘can’t’ change a wheel on her car and waits helplessly for some man to step forward and do it for her; the man who holds up his crumpled shirt with what he hopes is an appealing smile and simpers to the woman in his life that he ‘doesn’t know how’ to use an iron. It’s not just that they want the job done but also that they want to be loved for their helplessness. They are the walking, talking human manifestation of the famous heart-rending, head-on-one-side, big-eyed gaze of an Andrex puppy – and often they make you want to give them a good, hard kick.