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

You want the excitement of seeing whatever it is you’re waiting for as soon as you possibly can.

It could also cover those secret glances at the telephone when you’re expecting a call, or the surreptitious checking of your email or Twitter feed to see if anyone has tried to contact you.

It’s surreptitious because you know, deep down inside, that it’s a sign of weakness, but it’s an appealing sort of weakness. It’s the opposite of composed self-possession – an involuntary admission of a lack of confidence. While we’re encouraged to strive to be the sort of person who breezes through life brimming with self-belief and with no thought for the possibility of failure or rejection, few of us really buy into it. So to see someone acknowledge, even with a silent downward glance at a mobile phone, that they’re anxious for something to happen and worried that it might not is to realize that we’re not alone in the world.

The empathy felt when someone else makes a complete fool of himself

Ask someone for an example of a foreign word that can’t be translated into English and they’re most likely to come up with the German Schadenfreude ( SHAH-den-froy-duh ), which means the guilty thrill of pleasure felt when someone else comes a cropper. Think Laurel and Hardy and a custard pie or, for a more scholarly approach, you could refer to the Summa Theologica of the thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian St Thomas Aquinas on the eagerly anticipated delights of heaven: ‘That the saints may enjoy their beatitude more thoroughly, and give more abundant thanks for it to God, a perfect sight of the punishment of the damned is granted them.’

So, among the other joys of Paradise, one might experience an eternity of heavenly Schadenfreude while gazing down on the suffering, tortured souls below. There’s something horribly smug about the idea, but it’s a word that has been picked up from the German and is quite commonly used in English, so it’s clear we recognize the feeling.

A 2013 academic study in the United States concluded that taking pleasure in this way from other people’s misfortunes or failures is a ‘normal’ human response, but that doesn’t necessarily make it one we should be proud of. [23] Professor Susan Fiske and Mina Cikara, ‘Their pain, our pleasure: stereotype content and schadenfreude’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences , vol. 1299, September 2013. Importantly, it’s not the only response possible when we see someone making a fool of themselves.

Imagine that you are at a wedding reception and the best man rises to make his speech. You realize first from the way that he is holding on to the table for support, and then from the slight slurring of his words, that he has been a bit too free with the beers, the wine and the champagne. And then he starts to speak. It is a car crash in slow motion. The jokes would have been too vulgar even for the stag night, and here the bride’s parents and her elderly relatives are starting to shift uneasily in their chairs. The bride is looking distinctly unhappy, and the groom has his head in his hands. But the best man is oblivious and ploughs drunkenly on …

Well, you might feel a sneaking sense of malicious delight in his predicament – Schadenfreude . But you might also, in a more sympathetic spirit, shudder with embarrassment on his behalf. If the words we use reflect the emotions that we feel, it’s rather worrying that we have one to describe that first unworthy feeling but nothing for the more generous response.

And yet Schadenfreude does have a more charitable opposite in German. Fremdschämen (FREMT-shah-mun) literally means ‘foreign-shame’, and it describes the feeling of being embarrassed on someone else’s behalf – that ‘No, don’t do it!’ feeling that you have as your drunken friend staggers to his feet. In fact, it needn’t be someone that you know, and they may not even be aware of how they are letting themselves down, but you can still feel your toes start to curl in vicarious embarrassment.

The fact that we use the one German word and not the other suggests that English speakers are a peculiarly unsympathetic lot. Other European languages have their own words for the feeling: in Spanish it’s pena ajena ( PEH-nah ackh-EYN-ah , where the ckh is pronounced at the back of the throat, like the Scottish loch ); vergonha alheia ( ver-GOHN-ya’al-EY-ya ) in Portuguese; myötähäpeä ( my-ER-ta-HAP-ey-a ) in Finnish. They all mean more or less the same thing. Plaatsvervangende schaamte ( PLAHTS-ver-VONG-EN-duh-SHAHM-tuh ) in Dutch probably has the most helpful literal translation – ‘place-exchanging shame’. While in English, all we can do is shudder with embarrassment and wish for the ground to swallow us up.

To be fair, Fremdschämen only appeared in the German language within the last ten years, so the Germans aren’t that far ahead of us, but it still means that the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Finns and the Dutch are apparently instinctively more generous and sympathetic than English speakers. Here, then, is a word to help us express our better selves.

The gentle verbal ping-pong between two people who both insist on paying and won’t back down

Picture the scene. Two friends are in a cafe, ordering at the counter and looking forward to a catch-up over some caffeine.

‘That’ll be £4.40, please,’ says the extortionist barista.

One of the friends dives into her purse to find some cash, which she attempts to hand over. The trouble is that the other friend is unwittingly schooled in t’aarof , and she holds out some cash, too. The result is that these two women, both of them with impeccable manners, squabble like schoolgirls, pushing each other’s hands aside over who is going to pay for both of them.

These ‘No, let me ’ arguments over dinner bills, or rounds of drinks, or cinema tickets can be painful, and there is an alternative. You want to pay? Fine, you pay, and next time it will be my turn. It will all even up in the end, for God’s sake. But that’s the view of someone with no concept of t’aarof .

T’aarof ( TAA-ruf ) is the Farsi word for a system of etiquette that is central to social life in Iran. It involves an assumption of deference, with each party to a discussion insisting that the other is more worthy of consideration. So the most casual visitor to an Iranian home will be offered tea, or perhaps a piece of fruit, or a sweetmeat with yogurt or honey. By the rules of t’aarof , he will decline, and the host will repeat the offer more urgently. This can go on through several exchanges, just like the two women fighting over coffee, until one or the other weakens. (If you’re supposed to be trying to turn down the sweetmeats, it’s as well to make sure that you’re the one who weakens. They’re delicious.)

To outsiders – particularly Americans, who generally pride themselves on saying what they mean and meaning what they say – this can be confusing, but behind the courteous fencing is a genuine confusion that has to be eradicated. The host wants, above all, to be welcoming, and so offers the refreshment however inconvenient it may be. The guest, in turn, might like the drink or the food but, more than that, doesn’t want to inconvenience his host. And so the exchange starts, with each side looking for clues about what the other is really thinking.

The principle extends throughout various situations. If a guest compliments his host on any of his possessions – a piece of glassware or a picture – he may well be offered it as a gift, and the same dizzying circle of refusal and increasingly pressing offer will begin. A shopkeeper may insist that the item to be bought is really worthless, whereupon a sort of reverse haggling starts, with the purchaser insisting on its value and the shopkeeper talking it down; a group of businessmen may refuse to answer a question until it is clear which one is the most senior and he has given his opinion.