And then, when you forget to take the cake out of the oven, you’ll have made a bourach of that as well.
Schnapsidee
(German)
An off-the-wall idea that comes from a drinking session
Good ideas don’t just come from nowhere. We all need something to spark the imagination, to get our thoughts running, and sometimes that something is a couple of drinks. Alcohol can set off all sorts of ideas, but most of them aren’t good at all. Making decisions after a late-night session is seldom a sensible plan. Most of the inspiration that comes out of the neck of a bottle would have been better left deeply buried in your subconscious.
The Germans have a word for the sort of idea that results – a schnapsidee (SHNAPS-i-day) is, literally, a ‘booze-idea’, and it’s used to describe a suggestion that is seen as completely impractical. Schnaps is the German for spirits or strong liquor, but the word is used even when there’s no implication that the person putting forward the idea has been drinking. A young child could have a schnapsidee, or a teetotal church minister.
The point about a schnapsidee that English finds it impossible to get across in phrases such as ‘hare-brained plan’ or even ‘midsummer madness’ – which are a couple of translations that are sometimes suggested – is that it’s not just a bad idea, it’s an idea so ridiculous that you cannot have been thinking straight when you came up with it. It’s thoughtlessly, self-indulgently stupid.
But that makes it sound like a very solemn, judgemental term, which it’s not. Schnapsidee is generally used about less consequential ideas rather than serious issues. You might say that swimming in a river on Christmas Day is a schnapsidee, but a German wouldn’t have used the word – even if he’d dared to – to tell Hitler what he thought of his idea of marching to Moscow.
However, it has just the degree of surprised incredulity that we sometimes want to express about grandiose political programmes: ‘I just can’t believe anyone could ever have thought that was a good idea!’ It could apply on all sides of political divides. Calling a strike? Schnapsidee. Sending the police or the army to break a strike? Schnapsidee. Leave the European Union (or join the European Union)? Schnapsidee.
At the risk of getting into the dangerous area of national stereotypes, are the Germans maybe given to working things out in detail, planning, dotting every i and crossing every t? If so, perhaps that’s why they’ve won the football World Cup four times, but it might also explain why they have such a downer on off-the-wall ideas that come out of a bottle of booze.
If we’re going to steal someone else’s word and make it our own, we should take the chance to be really radical. While most ideas that come with the tang of alcohol on them would be better quietly forgotten, there are some that fly – some that come from a place deep inside us, where we have no inhibitions, where we have ideas that fizz and change the world. If a drink or two can unlock the door to that place, then we shouldn’t be so keen to write off the schnapsidee.
Imagine a Spanish merchant in the mid-fifteenth century sharing a glass of wine on the waterfront at Palos de la Frontera with a sea captain in his forties – not a young man in those days. ‘OK, Columbus, so you’re planning a trip to the Indies … but you want to sail which way?’ And off he wanders, shaking his head at the madness of the fool he’s just been talking to, the schnapsidee of it all – never guessing that a new world lies somewhere over the horizon and that the ‘fool’ will soon be walking on its beaches.
Why shouldn’t we use schnapsidee to mean an idea that seems to be wild and crazy, and leave open the possibility that it just might be a flash of the purest brilliance?
Here’s to the schnapsidee!
Acknowledgements
I’ve gone to many native speakers of different languages for help with writing this book, and also to scholars who have spent years gaining a deep understanding of a language that fascinates them. What they’ve all had in common is their enthusiasm – people want to share things that they find special about a language that they love.
There are too many to list them all, but I owe particular thanks to Bariya Ataya, Tamsin Craig, Elsa Davies, Eva Dingwall, Irakli Gabriadze, Orit Gadiesh, Quinten Gueurs, Ricky Lacey, Professor Vali Lalioti, Nino Madghachian, Professor Mark Riley, Wendy Robbins, Pat Roberts and Georgi Vardeli.
My agent, James Wills, and my editor, Andrea Henry, have given me the benefit of their valuable professional help; and I’ve enjoyed working on this book even more because from the start I’ve shared it, like everything else, with my wife Penny.
And finally, Dr Tim Littlewood and the NHS team in the Department of Haematology at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital. There really isn’t a word in any language to express what you feel when people save your life.