These days you wouldn’t translate that word into English as ‘a big girl’. For sitzpinkler, however, that might just be an ideal translation. A sitz is a seat, and pinkeln is what you might do privately while you were sitting down, if you happen to be a woman. (I’m making an effort to be delicate here.) So a sitzpinkler is a man who sits down to pee, hence a man who behaves like a woman, and hence – well, someone who’s not very macho in a patriarchal society where real men used to show off their duelling scars.
In an English conversation, each of these two words has the advantage of being mildly insulting in a way that won’t be understood and therefore won’t get you into trouble. But, if you are sufficiently sexist to want to use sitzpinkler as a term of abuse, you should be warned that times are changing. In these metrosexual days, it might actually be taken as a compliment. Signs have appeared in some German toilets warning that stehpinkeln (the opposite of sitzpinkeln) is messy and antisocial. Gadgets exist that play a recorded message to that effect every time a defiant man raises the seat. These warnings come in a variety of voices, including those of the former chancellors Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schröder.
Imagine some British manufacturer bringing out a similar gadget using the voices of Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair or David Cameron. But maybe that would be taking the cliché of the nanny state just a bit too far.
Soutpiel
(Afrikaans)
Scorn expressed at someone else’s inability to commit fully to something you believe in passionately
Sometimes, just sometimes, it’s necessary to be vulgar to get your point across with sufficient force. Take the occasions, for instance, when you are fully committed to an idea or a project, and you have poured yourself heart and soul into ensuring its success. There will be no second thoughts for you – you have burned your bridges, and you’re not looking back.
Perhaps it’s a minor issue, like playing for a football team or joining a political party, or perhaps it’s something life-changing, not just for you but for generations to come – something like building a nation, for instance.
You’ll hope that your commitment will inspire others to follow you – if it doesn’t, you may be doomed to failure – but you expect those who follow to feel the same level of enthusiasm and single-mindedness when they join as you had right at the beginning. Instead, as the venture begins to show the first signs that it is going to work, you find people flocking to reap the fruits of your hard work while carefully preserving their way out in case things go wrong.
Instead of diving in alongside you, they are constantly looking back nervously over their shoulders, ready to pull out and run for cover the first time things take a turn for the worse.
What’s the word you would choose to describe such people? ‘Freeloaders’ might do, except that it doesn’t carry the sense of cowardly retrospection that you are looking for. ‘Fainthearts’ the same – and neither one begins to touch the contempt and ridicule that you want to express.
That is the problem, early in the twentieth century, which faced the Afrikaaner farmers of South Africa – a people who, with some justification, did not enjoy a good press during much of that century. They felt that the English settlers who had flooded out there after the Boer War were never wholeheartedly committed to the future of South Africa, that they maintained close links to Europe, with property and investments ‘back home’ as an insurance policy in case they needed to cut and run.
‘Soutpiel,’ (SOHT-peel) some leathery-faced old Boer must have spat into the dust as he chewed his biltong. The word means literally, in Afrikaans, ‘salt-dick’, and at that moment he gave to the world the memorable image of someone standing with one foot in South Africa and the other in England, his legs stretched so that his penis dangled in the sea. The same thought might apply today to those in England who want to stay in the European Union but defend Britain’s right to do things differently, or perhaps the many celebrities who seem to live on both sides of the Atlantic at once.
Today, soutpiel has been softened into the almost affectionate ‘soutie’ (SOHT-y), and in town if not in the rural Afrikaaner heartland, English-speaking South Africans may even sometimes use it to describe themselves.
Other former colonial nations have coined their own less-than-respectful names for the citizens of the mother country. The Americans have limey, a contemptuous reference to the lime juice that would be added to the Royal Navy’s rum ration during the nineteenth century – a sneer that rather backfired, as the vitamin C in the lime juice did at least keep the sailors free from scurvy and the oozing wounds, loose teeth, jaundice, fever and death to which it led.
In Australia, no one really knows where the term Pom comes from, though there have been several unconvincing explanations such as Pomegranate, describing the colour that the fair-skinned English went in the sun, or P.O.H.M.S., short for Prisoner of Her Majesty’s Service. The Scots have Sassenach, which means Saxon, not necessarily affectionately, and shows what long memories the Celts have.
But nothing matches the scorn and derision of that vivid Afrikaaner image of the Englishman stretching desperately to keep a foot in both countries, with his pride and joy dangling disconsolately in the chilly waters of the South Atlantic.
Elusive Emotions
Aware
(Japanese)
A sense of the fragility of life
You might, on a walk in late summer, see a leaf gently float down to the ground from a high branch. Perhaps you may come downstairs one morning to see that the vase of flowers that last night looked so fresh and full of life has begun to lose its petals. Or you might watch the reds and golds of a beautiful sunset gradually fade away as the sun sinks in the sky.
Any of those experiences might bring you a feeling that the Japanese would call aware (ah-WAH-reh) – a deep sense of beauty, coloured by the realization that what you are looking at is fragile and fleeting. It is this sense of the impermanence of beauty that lies at the heart of aware.
For the Japanese, it is often expressed in the aesthetic concept of mono no aware, which translates roughly as ‘the pathos of things’. Nearly seven hundred years ago in Tsurezuregusa, or Essays in Idleness, the Japanese poet and hermit Yoshida Kenkō observed that if people lived for ever, then material things would lose their power to move us. ‘The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty,’ he said.[6]
For the Japanese, one very common expression of aware is in the contemplation of the cherry blossom, which usually lasts only a few days before it begins to fall. In the parks and gardens of Tokyo, silent groups will gather in early April just to look at the array of blossom on the trees as the flowers slowly wilt and die. Coincidentally – and showing that emotions are universal, even though English may lack the precise words to express them – back in late nineteenth-century England, the shy, buttoned-up poet A. E. Housman also chose the cherry blossom to express his own sense of the fragility of beauty and of human life.
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