I Never Knew There Was a Word for It - Adam Jacot De Boinod [14]
Manic obsessive
No one, as far as we know, died of laziness. Frantic activity, however, is another thing …
Putzfimmel (German) a mania for cleaning
samlermani (Danish) a mania for collecting
Grüebelsucht (German) an obsession in which even the simplest facts are compulsively queried
muwaswas (Arabic) to be obsessed with delusions
potto (Japanese) to be so distracted or preoccupied that you don’t notice what is happening right in front of you
… and can lead to karoshi (Japanese), death from overwork.
The German mindset
A distinguishing feature of the German language is its creation of evocative concepts by linking different words together, useful for depicting not just characters but states of mind. Most of us know Schadenfreude (literally, damage joy), which describes what we hardly dare express: that feeling of malicious pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. But there are numerous others. We’ve all had a boss who’s suffered from Betriebsblindheit: organizational blindness; and who has not worked alongside someone who is fisselig: flustered to the point of incompetence? That very same person could be described as a Korinthenkacker: one who is overly concerned with trivial details.
False friends
fatal (German) annoying
hardnekkig (Dutch) stubborn
lawman (Aukan, Suriname) crazy person
estúpido (Portuguese) rude
morbido (Italian) soft, tender
xerox (French) unoriginal or robotic individual
extravagans (Hungarian) eccentric
konsekvent (Swedish) consistent
Fools and rogues
There’s a rich stream of invective running through the world’s languages when it comes to people we regard as less intelligent than ourselves. The Cantonese equivalent to ‘you’re as thick as two short planks’ is the equally graphic nie hochi yat gau faan gam, ‘you look like a clump of cooked rice’, while the German equivalent to ‘not quite all there’ is nicht alle Tassen im Schrank haben, ‘not to have all the cups in the cupboard’ (not to have all one’s marbles).
Meanwhile the Maoris of the Cook Islands have the telling word varevare, which means ‘to be very young and still quite hopeless’.
Schlumps and schleppers
When it comes to insults, few languages can compete with Yiddish. In this wonderfully evocative language, a fool can be not just a shmutte or a schlump but a nar, a tam, a tipesh, a bulvan, a shoyte, a peysi, a kuni lemel, a lekish, or even a shmenge.
Not content with these, the language gets more specific. A loser is a schlepper, a shmugeggeshnorrer, a paskudnik, a pisher, a yold or even a no-goodnik. A klutz is a clumsy, oafish bungler and a lekish ber schlemiel is a fool without luck. A fool who is not just stupid but inept is a schlimazl. A farshpiler is one who has lost all his money gambling. The saddest of all is perhaps the nisrof, the burnt-out fool.
Other fine insults in Yiddish have included:
nebbish a nobody
nudnick a yakky, aggressively boring person
putz a simpleton
shlub a clumsy and ill-mannered person
shmegegge a foolish person and a sycophant
shmendrick a timid nonentity
shnook a nice but pathetic gullible person
All talk
Worse than the fool is one of those people who occur in every organization on the planet: the buchipluma (Caribbean Spanish), the person who promises but doesn’t deliver. The same language has a useful verb for the way such people behave: culipanear, which means to look for excuses for not meeting obligations.
Fibbers
Even the infuriating buchipluma is surely preferable to the outright liar. And, as Japanese vividly shows, from lying to someone (nimaijita o tsukau, to use two tongues), it’s just a small step to duping (hanage o nuku handy, literally, to pull the hair out of their nostrils) or doublecrossing them (negaeri o utsu, literally, to roll them over while sleeping).