Well, so much for national stereotypes. The statistics tell a different story. They show that if anyone needs an excuse for piling on weight it’s the British. English speakers in Europe – the UK and Ireland – occupy two of the top three places in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s European league table of obesity, with only Hungary above. The Germans, for all their pigs’ trotters and apple strudels and immense steins of lager, are a svelte and highly respectable seventeenth.
Given it’s the Brits who are guilty of shovelling in the fish and chips, double-size burgers and cream cakes, we do need an excuse for such poor eating habits, and kummerspeck could be the one. We should be thankful to the Germans for providing us with the word and take it to our hearts – where those fatty deposits are busy constricting our arteries – at once.
Jayus
(Indonesian)
A joke so unfunny you have to laugh
When your children are small, you want to make them laugh and be happy, and so you tell them jokes – simple jokes, the sort they’ll understand, with puns and pratfalls and probably a few rude noises as well. They will want to please you in return, in the way that children do, and so, even though they haven’t had the chance yet to learn what sort of things really are funny, they laugh.
And so you believe that you have told them a funny joke and go on to repeat the performance, again and again. That loud click you may or may not hear at around this point is the sound of the trap snapping shut: you are now telling Dad-jokes, and the habit will enslave you. Since parents never notice their children growing up, you will probably continue to do it, if they let you, well into their teens and possibly beyond. Finally, you will be telling Grandad-jokes, from which sad fate there is definitely no escape.
The Indonesians clearly understand this predicament, since they have a word to describe both the joke and the person who tells it – jayus (jie-OOS). It’s a joke that simply isn’t funny and neither is the person who tells it – a joke, in fact, that fails so completely that the hearer has to laugh because it is so bad.
It doesn’t apply only to men or fathers. Teachers are another group particularly prone to jayus. It’s a word that belongs originally to the informal language of Indonesia, bahasa gaul, which is generally used in day-to-day conversation and in popular newspapers and magazines, and so it’s a way to deflate authority or pomposity.
It’s more than just a bad or a lame joke. It may be the quality of the telling that makes a jayus rather than the story itself, but the laughter that it causes comes in relief that the performance is over, in surprise that anyone could tell such a bad joke, or in mockery of the poor sap who has tried so hard and so ineffectually to be funny.
It’s certainly not polite, sympathetic laughter, to make the joke-teller feel better, because that would be a deliberate and purposeful decision, and the response to a jayus is as instinctive and irresistible as a genuine belly laugh. In fact, just like the self-deluding, joke-telling dad, the jayus may take the laughter at face value and continue to believe that he is a natural-born comedian.
And that, of course, is a joke in itself – just not the one he thought he was telling. The joker has become the joke, which, for all the pleasure it may give his listeners, is not a place anyone would like to be. But there are worse things to be than a jayus. A world that contains Dad-jokes also contains Dad-dancing. And no language on earth, thank God, has a word for that.
Guddle & Bourach
(Scots)
A bit of a mess that can be sorted out & a hideous mess that is almost irreparable
Back in 2007, the Scottish National Party came to power in Edinburgh after an election that had been beset by problems and controversy. In fact, commented the BBC’s Scottish political editor, Brian Taylor, it had been a ‘voting guddle’ (GUDD-ull). But it was worse than that, he went on: ‘The authorities are saying: (1) we couldn’t get all the ballot papers out; (2) they were so complex, people couldn’t fill them in; (3) when they finally filled them in, we couldn’t count the blasted things! There’s a splendid Gaelic word, bourach. It means an utter, hideous mess. This is bourach, Mach Five.’[24]
In fact, bourach (BOO-rackh, where the ckh is pronounced at the back of the throat, as in loch) has several meanings, all of them coming from the original sense of a pile or a heap. The Lanarkshire poet John Black, in his collection Melodies and Memories, wrote in 1909 of tea parties with ‘Bourachs big o’ cake and bun, to grace the feasts an’ spice the fun.’ It also came to mean a cluster or a small group of people, birds or animals, and at the same time a small hut, particularly one used by children to play in – presumably because such a rough hut might well look like a pile of stones.
But it’s in the sense of a mess or a state of confusion that it’s mostly used today, and the comparison with guddle helps to define both words. Guddle was originally a verb, which meant to grope around uncertainly under water and, more particularly, to try to catch a fish with your bare hands. From that sense of blind uncertainty, it gained the meaning that it has today. It has an attractive sound, but we have any number of words already that mean much the same thing – think of muddle, mess or jumble.
So a bourach is like a guddle, only more so.
Either one is a splendidly evocative word for a whole variety of confusions, from the organizational shambles of the Scottish election to the normal state of a teenager’s bedroom, to the chaos that follows the start of roadworks on a busy street. The difference is that a guddle is a bit of a tangle that can be sorted with some patience and application, whereas a bourach is the sort of rats’ nest of chaos that makes you want to throw your hands in the air and give up.
So, while a guddle is often something that has simply happened – nobody’s fault, just an example of how things can go wrong – a bourach is often the result of someone’s good intentions going awry. You can make a bourach of a place or of a job, but either way it’s going to be the sort of experience that you won’t forget in a hurry. Suppose, for instance, that you are baking a cake. The kitchen can often get in a bit of a guddle, particularly if you don’t put things away and wash up as you go. You’ll have a lot of tidying up and clearing to do once the cake’s in the oven, but with a bit of work everything will be fine by the time it’s cooked.
But now add in a four-year-old child who’s desperate to help. Not only will they keep getting extra plates and cake tins out of the cupboard in case you need them, they’ll also want to sift the flour for you and end up getting it all over the floor, the curtains and probably themselves. They may decide, while your back is turned, that what the cake really needs is a sprinkling of chocolate chips, but in reaching to take them down from the shelf, they’ll spill most of them and eat the rest. Half a pound of sugar will vanish down the back of a cupboard, and along the way a whole bottle of milk will be spilt, two eggs will be dropped on the floor and three of your favourite dishes will end up in pieces. Between you, you will have made a complete bourach of the kitchen.
24
Brian Taylor, report on Holyrood election 2007 http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/election07/scotland/2007/05/ah_bourach.html).