Finnish Peculiarities, Part II: “Pakkopulla”

This is the second installment of the short series of posts about peculiar, hardly translatable Finnish words that I introduced in the previous post.

The word of today’s post is a real treat (pun, which will become clear in a moment, not intended), this one: the notion of pakkopulla (noun).

It is a very well known and much used compound word comprised of the simpler notions of pakko and pulla. Of these, pulla means “bun” – in the sense of sugary treat made out of wheat dough such as cardamom bread or sweet coffee bread, but not in the sense of the salty bread roll which “bun” could also stand for in English. In Finnish we have different terms for the two: the sweet treat is pulla, whereas the salty bread roll sort of bun is called sämpylä.

The first part of the compound, pakko, in turn, is slightly more complicated. The web dictionary that I often use suggests translating is as “force,” “necessity,” “compulsion,” “compulsory,” “coercion,” “duress,” or “must.” Another way to put it: pakko is used to characterize something that someone has to do, mostly in situations where they wouldn’t want to do it. For example: “Minä en halua mennä kouluun!” (“I don’t want to go to school!”) might get the answer “Siitä huolimatta, sinun on pakko mennä!” (“Regardless, you have to go!”). Related to this: the verb pakottaa means “to force / make someone do something.”

The compound word pakkopulla – which, I should mention, is in practice more often used in the partitive form pakkopullaa (one would more often use it in a sentence like, “This here is just awful pakkopullaa,” than in a sentence like, “This here is just an awful pakkopulla”) – would then literally mean a compulsory / necessary / forced / coerced sweet coffee bread. But it is actually a metaphoric expression for a task such that one does not feel like doing (a task that one finds detestable, boring, or perhaps just troublesome or awkward), but is something that (one feels or knows that) one has to do.

Let me offer some examples, to use pakkopulla(a) in a few sentences.

“Kyllähän tämä on täyttä pakkopullaa, mutta se on vaan hoidettava” : “This is utter pakkopullaa, yes, but we just have to take care of it”

“Ottelun ollessa jo 5–0, toinen puoliaika oli molemmille joukkueille lähinnä pakkopullaa” : “As the game was 5–0 already, the second half was mostly pakkopullaa for both teams”

“Olen koettanut olla ajattelematta autotallin siivoamista etukäteen, se on vain niin hirvittävä pakkopulla” : “I have tried not to think about the cleaning of the garage in advance, it’s just such a horrible pakkopulla”

“Rehtorin puheen kuunteleminen on koulumme lapsille usein toistuva pakkopulla” : “Listening to the principle’s speech is an oft-recurring pakkopulla for the kids in our school.”

So it is a task, something to be done, that one refers to with this term, and mainly to express what kind of a task the speaker perceives it as – the speaker’s feelings about it. Therefore, it is a noun mixed with lots of adjective-like content. One way to put this is to say that pakkopulla is a descriptive noun: grammatically it behaves like a noun, but it also tells us something about the qualities of the object that one calls pakkopulla, qualities which could alternatively be described with adjectives like “troublesome,” “boring,” “awkward,” or “detestable.” Yet grammatically it is not an adjective, because it cannot be conjugated into comparative and superlative form. (You might hear even a native speaker making a mistake about this and attempting to conjugate pakkopulla as if it were an adjective, precisely because its meaning is so close to an adjective, but those attempts (pakkopullampi and pakkopullaisin) sound just wrong, and indeed are wrong.) There is an adjective derived from the word, though: pakkopullamainen (pakkopulla-like), which, since it is an adjective, can be conjugated into comparative and superlative forms (pakkopullamaisempi and pakkopullamaisin).

As the examples above may already have suggested, a striking difference between the words pakko and pakkopulla is that the latter is pretty much always used by people who have to do the thing, the pakkopulla – or by an outsider able to take their perspective on it and sympathetic to their anguish – whereas the term pakko can also be used by someone ordering others to do the thing referred to. Pakkopulla cannot sensibly be used in place of the term pakko in an imperative sentence expressing a demand that someone do the thing that they wouldn’t want to do. That is, whereas I might demand you to do something by saying: “Sinun on pakko tehdä se!” (“You have to / must do it!”), the claim “Sinun on pakkopullaa tehdä se!” cannot be used that way, because grammatically speaking it is not an imperative but a statement of fact, and would sound ridiculous or borderline nonsensical were I to exclaim it with a tone of voice normally used when uttering an imperative.

Now I do not know for certain what the origins of the term pakkopulla are, but I just recently read from somewhere that the same term has sometimes been used to refer to a real, relatively plain bun which one is expected to eat for starters before it be deemed appropriate to eat any of the other, more delicious offerings on a (coffee) table.

I had not expected that; but I realized that it made perfect sense in light of some of my own childhood experiences...

When I was a small child, our family used to visit my grandaunt Toini (born in the 1910s, if I remember correctly) every other week or so, and she would always have a coffee table laid full with really tempting delicacies – a Swiss roll, perhaps, or Danish pastries, an apple -, or blueberry pie, as well as one or two sorts of biscuits and sweets. Even a creamy layer cake there may sometimes have been. But before you were allowed to touch any of those, you had to eat what aunt Toini actually called velvollisuuspulla (literally, “duty bun”): a big (to a child, at least), plain wheat bun that had barely a touch of sugar crumbs on top. It seemed to take forever to chew and swallow down that massive lump of sheer viscosity!

I can tell you it was most frustrating for a child; the thing truly lived up to the name “duty bun.” But of course, I can now see the rationality behind the tradition, and would expect to find some version of it in many cultures where people have been living in scarcity – as people certainly had still in the early-twentieth century Finland (I will say more about that in some other post). The rationality is that, while a good host would of course try and provide a rich assortment of servings for his or her guests, the guests were supposed to know better than to just go crazy and eat it all to the last crumb because, for all they knew, those might well have been all the food that there was in the house. In that sort of circumstance, it would be convenient to have everyone eat a semi-ceremonial, less expensive but very filling, food item for starters, because that would help the guests to eat in moderation.