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

The team was expected to plod on ploughing its furrow until it had to rest – a distance that was reckoned to be about 220 yards (just over 200 metres) and which therefore became known as a furrowlong, or furlong. The stick with which the ploughman controlled the oxen had to be five and a half yards long (just over five metres) to reach the front pair – one rod long. Put four of those rods end to end and you reach the width of the area that the team aimed to plough in a day. That distance became known as a chain in the seventeenth century, when surveyors started to use chains as the most accurate way to measure it, and survives as the length of a cricket pitch. Multiply the length of a furrow (220 yards) by a chain (22 yards), and you have an acre (4,840 square yards), the area a team was expected to plough in day. Do the maths and marvel.

It all sounds complicated and slightly arbitrary today, but it wouldn’t have done in the times when men went out to plough the fields every day. Then, the units would have chimed with the way they lived their lives. And the same was true for the herdsmen who drove reindeer across the wastes of northern Finland. Their unit of measurement was even more down to earth.

A poronkusema ( por-on-koo-SAY-mah ) was the distance that a reindeer was believed to be capable of travelling without stopping for a pee. If you’re interested – and if you were herding the animals, you would be – it’s about 7.5 kilometres. It was in official use as a measurement of distance until metrication in the late nineteenth century.

It’s unlikely, in the twenty-first century, we’re ever going to need to know the distance that we can drive a reindeer along a motorway until we need a reindeer service station. The poronkusema is obsolete in more ways than one. But perhaps it’s worth a new lease of life as a way of describing something like a typewriter or those dusty antique farm-workers’ tools that you sometimes see hanging on the walls of country pubs – something that is old and outdated, it’s true, but which reminds us nostalgically of past times.

Irreparable damage to something caused by a botched attempt to mend it

It may seem hard for anyone under fifty to believe, but there was a day when an ordinary person could open the bonnet of a car and have at least a sporting chance of understanding what they found there. They could fiddle with the engine, tweak it a bit, even fix it when it went wrong. Not today, of course – everything is governed by a computer that can only be reset by a piece of equipment that costs a fortune and needs a graduate in electronic engineering to make it work.

You could drive a car on which the clutch linkage was made out of a twisted wire coat hanger, or use a pair of tights as a fan belt (while hoping your mother didn’t miss them). You might even have broken an egg into the radiator in an attempt to fix a water leak. But those are far-off golden days, when the summers were warmer and the chocolate bars bigger and tastier. And the memories of how we used to raise the car’s bonnet and work magic with the engine are a little rose-tinted, too.

The description that comes to mind for these attempted running repairs is not do-it-yourself wizard or ad hoc genius but farpotshket .

Try as you might to pretend differently, not only did these fixes not work (except for the coat hanger and the clutch – that modification could be carried out by an expert and the car would work for years), they ended in disaster. Farpotshket ( fahr-POTS-SKEHT ) is a Yiddish word which describes something that is irreparably damaged as a result of ham-fisted attempts to mend it.

It’s the second part of that definition that makes the word such a delight. It’s not just that it doesn’t work – that would be bad enough but easily described with the American military acronym SNAFU (Situation Normal: All – umm – Fouled Up). The point about something being farpotshket is that you messed it up yourself, or you trusted someone else to do it and they messed it up for you. There is something hair-tearingly infuriating about it – the word carries with it just an echo of the superior sniggering of the experts who could have done it all so much better, if only you’d paid them. But more than anything, it comes with the resigned shrugged shoulder of a person who knows that he should have known better. It was never going to work.

It has an associated verb that is almost as expressive – potshky ( POTs-ski ) is to fiddle with something in a well-meaning and purposeful way but with a complete lack of competence. You can potshky with anything – cars and other machines, of course, but also with intangible things like diary arrangements, things you have written, or even relationships. What they have in common is that once you have potshky- ed with them, they will collapse in disarray. And it will all be your own fault.

Cars, computers, electronic devices – the relevance of farpotshket to daily life today is obvious. ‘It looks simple enough – that little wire seems to have come adrift. If I just connect it there …’ BANG! And then you call the helpline and a concerned voice on the other side of the world says, ‘Well, as long as you didn’t … Oh, that is what you did. Well, it’s farpotshket then.’ Or at least they would if we could say that in English.

A silent, cautious, prowling walk – like that of a cat

Cats, for all the pictures on the Internet showing them looking cute with ribbons around their necks and peering winningly over the edge of a cardboard box, are carefully designed killing machines. The merciless green eyes give nothing away; the claws that can rip off a mouse’s head with a single flick are delicately sheathed out of sight in those silky soft paws; and the creature proceeds stealthily, one foot placed precisely in front of another, as it makes its silky, sinuous way towards its prey.

It’s a way of moving that we sometimes try to emulate, perhaps in order to avoid waking someone up or disturbing them while they are concentrating or listening to music. Perhaps, if we are of a particularly infantile turn of mind, we simply want to creep up behind them and say ‘Boo’.

We might tiptoe, but we might also put our heel to the ground first and then carefully roll down the outside of our foot until our weight is on the ball of the foot, walking silently like a moccasin-clad Native American making his way through the forest. And the reason that this way of walking has to be so carefully described is that we simply don’t have a word for it.

Or at least we do, but we use it differently – ‘pussyfooting’ would be an ideal word to describe walking like a cat, but we’ve invested that with its own incongruous meaning. You can’t imagine a cat ‘pussyfooting’ around its prey. Delicate and infinitely cautious they may be, but when they are hunting they move straight towards their dinner.

The Swedes have a much better word. Tass ( TASS ) is an animal’s paw and tassa ( tas-SAH ) is the verb meaning to walk silently and delicately, like an animal. It is quite distinct from either ‘tiptoe’ or ‘pad’ – the two words in English that might be used most commonly to translate it. Tiptoeing, by contrast, sounds crude and clunky. The noun ‘pad’ – meaning the sole of an animal’s foot, which we turn into a verb in order to say ‘padding around’ – has none of the sense of silence, caution and deliberation that tassa carries with it. It’s partly the sound of the word – that double-s in the middle has the effect of a finger to the lips and a quiet ‘sshhh!’