Эндрю Тэйлор - The Greeks Had a Word for It - Words You Never Knew You Can’t Do Without

It’s not a particularly sentimental word in itself. Some authorities suggest that the gesture originated in a mother’s gentle search through her children’s hair for fleas and lice, and if that thought isn’t enough to quell any incipient sentimentality, it’s sometimes accompanied by the clicking of the fingernails to mimic the cracking of occasional nits. There’s still plenty of affection in the gesture – like two chimpanzees gently grooming each other – though the click of lice’s eggs being destroyed is not necessarily a sound you would wish to reproduce on a Valentine’s Day card, even if you could.

Gentle, undemanding affection, the sort of love that asks for nothing.

So it doesn’t apply only to humans. You might be gently tickling the head of a much-loved dog or cat, or – Brazilians being well known for their love of horses – stroking the soft, silky hair of a horse’s ears. It’s a pleasant experience for both the giver and the receiver, and it demands nothing from either of them. So it’s a word that describes a state of mind and the action that it leads to – not urgent, not demanding, maybe even slightly distracted and carried out with a mind that is floating aimlessly around other pleasant, undemanding topics. There is room for more cafuné in our lives.

The post-work period set aside for illicit love

In staid, respectable Britain, five o’clock in the afternoon signifies little more than the end of a nine-to-five working day, the peak of the rush hour and the time when a man’s chin may begin to bristle with shadow. In France, they do things differently, and with more style.

There, five o’clock marks – or used to mark – the start of le cinq-à-sept (SAÑK-a-SETT ), those magical two hours that Frenchmen – or maybe Frenchwomen too, come to that – having slipped away from work, would spend whispering sweet Gallic nothings in the ears of their lovers. Or perhaps that was all part of the stereotype dreamed up by the envious English, who like to believe that everything French, whether it is maids, leave, kisses or knickers, must be slightly naughty.

In any case, by the mid-sixties the French writer Françoise Sagan was declaring in her novel La Chamade that this time for lovers was all in the past. ‘In Paris, no one makes love in the evening any more; everyone is too tired,’ sighed one of her characters. [1] Françoise Sagan, La Chamade , tr. Robert Westhoff (London: Penguin Books, 1968). It was not that the country had succumbed to a fit of English morality, just that the preferred time for illicit romance had moved forward in the afternoon to between two and four. Le cinq-à-sept had become le deux-à-quatre . The French were simply rescheduling their afternoon delight. They were not going to give up what the English referred to vulgarly as their ‘bit on the side’. After all, the wife and mistress of President Mitterrand stood side by side at his funeral; Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was rumoured to have so many mistresses that he had to leave a sealed letter saying where he might be found in case of emergency on any particular evening.

Going back further in history, the great nineteenth-century French playwright Alexandre Dumas is said to have returned home unexpectedly to find his wife in bed and, a few moments later, his best friend hiding naked in her wardrobe. With true Gallic flair, he ended up sleeping on one side of his slightly surprised wife, while the lover slept on the other. [2] This unsourced story, which Dumas is said to have enjoyed, appears in several collections of anecdotes from the nineteenth century onwards.

It’s worth noting that in Canada, where the French speakers have clearly lived for too many years alongside their strait-laced Anglophone compatriots, the phrase has lost its quietly salacious air: if a Québecois announces that he is going for a cinq-à-sept , he generally means no more than that he is planning to call in at the bar for happy hour.

The metropolitan French are made of sterner stuff. From Calais to the warm beaches of the Mediterranean, the true spirit of le cinq-à-sept lives on.

Someone who has a talent for getting out of a fix

The apologetic gift brought to soothe a lover’s anger

It’s probably inevitable that a nation with an idea like le cinq-à-sept in its vocabulary should need another one – a word like démerdeur ( DAY-MERRD-URR ).

It means literally, with the bluntness of the peasant’s cottage rather than the subtlety of les aristos , someone who is proficient at getting himself out of the merde – a bit of a rascal who may often find himself in trouble but who generally works out a way to extricate himself without too much of a fuss. The French dictionary doesn’t list a feminine equivalent – if it did, it would presumably be démerdeuse – but there’s obviously no reason why women, too, shouldn’t be up to no good and similarly adept at avoiding the consequences.

Either way, there is a clear note of admiration about the word. Whatever sin you may have committed – and démerdeur is often used about the sort of misbehaviour associated with le cinq-à-sept – is more than outweighed by the imagination and dash with which you walk away from it. It’s much more direct than the rather prissy English reference to someone who ‘always comes up smelling of roses’. Deep down, just about every French man or woman would rather like to be a démerdeur or a démerdeuse .

In Germany, they do things differently. There, instead of the devil-may-care derring-do of the démerdeur , they have the careful planning and guilty foresight of the person who purchases Drachenfutter ( DRACKH-en-foot-uh ). Drachenfutter means ‘dragon-fodder’, and it refers to the hopeful gift, whether it be flowers, chocolates or a diamond necklace, with which you might attempt to assuage the feelings of a lover you have angered.

There’s something sly, underhand and insincere about Drachenfutter – a feeling that the person who buys that calculating little present is rather cold-hearted and cowardly. You can bet that they wouldn’t call their lover a dragon to their face. You might not want to get too close to a démerdeur either, but at least they sound like fun. You probably wouldn’t get many laughs with your Drachenfutter .

Deep down, just about every French man or woman would rather like to be a démerdeur or a démerdeuse .

Do we need either word in English? Well, there are plenty of démerdeurs to be found on this side of the Channel. Footballers, musicians, politicians, lawyers – their names are to be found in the papers often enough. As for the less adventurous among us, the number of petrol stations selling sad bunches of wilting roses suggests that there must be quite a big market for Drachenfutter .

A gentle, unspoken feeling that you are about to fall in love

It’s not a coincidence that we talk of ‘falling’ in love. It’s a sudden thing, at least according to the songs – involuntary, inconvenient, irresistible, possibly even disastrous. It’s been compared, among other things, to being hit by a freight train. All in all, then, it doesn’t sound like a particularly enjoyable experience.

However, it doesn’t have to be any of those things. Just ask the Japanese. They have a phrase, koi no yokan ( KOY-noh-yoh-CAN ), which tells a very different story. It translates literally as ‘premonition of love or desire’, and it refers to the sense that you are about to fall in love with someone. There is no certainty, no commitment and probably no mutual awareness – certainly nothing is said – but the feeling is there. It’s not love, maybe not even desire – but it’s the realization that these things could be on the horizon.