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.

No, That Is Not What Kalsarikännit Means

Like most Finns, I was pleased to hear that the Finnish term kalsarikännit got hyped recently in social media, and in some more traditional media like Chicago Tribune, The Independent, and Vogue. They told us (a little bit tongue-in-cheek to be sure) that kalsarikännit is the latest exciting foreign concept that will steal the limelight from the previous year’s Nordic hit word, Danish hygge (which means certain kind of coziness), and the Swedish lagom (meaning, roughly, “neither too much nor too little”).

The meaning of kalsarikännit was described pretty uniformly by the said sources: the title of the piece in The Independent tells us that, “Finland has a word for getting drunk in your underwear at home,” and specifies in the main text that the activity is done “with no intention of going out”; according to Vogue the term means “drinking at home alone in your underwear”; and the Chicago Tribune’s story quoted a characterization offered at the website of (the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs’) Finland Promotion Board: “the feeling when you are going to get drunk home alone in your underwear with no intention of going out.”

In fact, all of the above characterizations draw from the material offered at the website of the Finland Promotion Board of the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs’ Department for Communications (phew, that is a mouthful!); and it seems to me that it was the Finland Promotion Board which actually got the whole international brouhaha about the concept started, with a little piece of clever PR work (which, of course, is exactly what this Promotion Board is meant to be doing): by publishing emojis to describe this and fifty-five other peculiarly Finnish concepts, activities, or phenomena.

Here are the emojis the Finland Promotion Board introduced for kalsarikännit:

Pretty cool; my compliments. (Although even better is the picture you see in some memes about kalsarikännit  – you know, the one where Homer Simpson is lying utterly wasted on a couch in his underpants, with an empty beer can in his hand and other empty cans scattered on the floor.) 

Now, this characterization of the term’s meaning, making it the word for this peculiar Finnish concept of getting drunk alone at home in one’s underwear, it is not quite accurate, I am afraid. It makes it funny, of course, and is not entirely incorrect either: kalsarikännit is indeed a humorous, laid-back notion which oftentimes does refer to the said kind of activity. It is a cool concept and absolutely deserves to be hyped by foreigners. But as it stands, the characterization is at least slightly misleading and therefore the notion could use some clarification, to straighten out a couple of misconceptions. For the term does not exactly translate as “getting drunk at home alone in underwear.” Even though the term can be used to refer to that, it is not, strictly speaking, its meaning. Nor is kalsarikännit in any way an untranslatable, mystical Finnish peculiarity. Let Uncle Tero explain ....


To begin with the literal meaning, and the composition of the word: kalsarikännit is a compound word, consisting of kalsari-, which is the unconjugated root of the word kalsarit (underwear; coming to our language from the Swedish word kalsonger), and the plural form kännit of the word känni (drunkenness, intoxication, being wasted), which is probably more often used in the plural but can also be used in the singular, usually without any noticeable difference in meaning (“Eiköhän vedetä kunnon känni!?” and “Eiköhän vedetä kunnon kännit!?” (the first here is in the singular, the second in the plural, in case you missed the plural -t in the latter) both mean, roughly, “Let’s get truly intoxicated/drunk/wasted, yes!?”). As to the first, kalsari- part of the compound, although kalsarit (similarly to housut (trousers)) by itself is always in the plural (for the same reason, I suppose, as “trousers” and “pants” and other such clothing articles that have separate slots for the person’s lower limbs are in the plural also in English), it is used in the singular as a first part of compound words, as in kalsariasu (underwear costume), kalsarisetti (underwear set), kalsarihylly (underwear shelf), kalsarikangas (underwear fabric), etc. (Notice how all these seem best written as two words in English; one thing that some Finns find a little difficult with English is how there are so many concepts that are written as two separate words. For in Finnish, by contrast, most concepts that are compounded from two (or, more!) simpler concepts are most often simply written together as compound words, which I believe makes it easier for the reader to grasp quickly the concepts being communicated.)

So we can start making sense of kalsarikännit by offering this literal translation: “underwear drunkenness” or “underwear intoxication” (although I can see how these might be taken as referring to some pervert’s state of mind when he is sniffing someone else’s used underwear ...).

But of course we want to know the semantic meaning of the term, not the literal meaning. As to the former, there are a couple of corrections to be made to the characterizations mentioned earlier, those which made kalsarikännit the term for (the process of, or perhaps the feeling of) getting drunk at one’s home in one’s underwear. That, as said, is not exactly what kalsarikännit means. In fact, clearly, that couldn’t be its meaning, because the getting part is a verb, of course, and that would require a verb in Finnish, too. The most conventional Finnish verb for getting drunk or wasted, getting into the state of känni – and, thus, into the state of kalsarikännit – is vetää (in the present tense: I vedän, you vedät, he/she vetää, we vedämme, you (plural) vedätte, they vetävät). Its most basic meaning is “to pull” (or, “to drag,” “to tow,”  etc.), but an astonishing variety of uses can be made of it in combination with other words, including vetää kännit (“to get intoxicated/drunk”) and vetää käteen (“to jerk off” (literally: “to pull into hand”), but more often used in the imperative-form exclamation, Vedä käteen! which means pretty much the same as “Fuck you!”).

More importantly, to get now to the more substantial misconceptions about the term repeated by the said foreign newspapers and magazines, kalsarikännit as such entails neither that you are alone, nor that you must be at home. The first time I heard the term used was actually when someone said something along the lines that, I do not feel like going out to bar tonight, so why don’t we just stay here at my place and do kalsarikännit? That is to say, you can very well do kalsarikännit together with some other people. It can be like pajama parties, with alcohol! Also, the concept as such does not refer to one’s own home; you could just as well do kalsarikännit at a friend’s house, or in a hotel room, or in some cabin, or even in a tent.


However, both of these aspects, the part that you need not necessarily be alone and the part that you need not do it at your own home, need a few words of clarification. They should not be taken to suggest that there can be a kalsarikännit event, like an actual party (perhaps I shouldn’t have made the reference to pajama parties, but let me hold on to that idea, with these words of clarification). You need not be alone to do kalsarikännit, but the concept definitely implies that is not a big social event. The big parties that they sometimes had at the Playboy Mansion, for example, or at some nightclub with a very special dress code, where there may have been hundreds of people in their underwear, I would say, were definitely not kalsarikännit. You could add to the definition of kalsarikännit that it is something that you do either by yourself or with a relatively small group of friends or family.

Another way to put it might be that the notion of kalsarikännit involves a certain contrast, which the above cited characterizations did mention: kalsarikännit is something that you do as opposed to going out – as opposed to going to parties or even to a bar. The real-life story I just mentioned, of a friend telling me that, as one does not feel like going out to bar tonight, why don’t we just do kalsarikännit instead, is a very good example of how one might set up kalsarikännit. Of course, you can also make the decision by yourself well before and do proper kalsarikännit alone, that is certainly a possibility. And in fact, this seems like a point worth emphasizing: the contrast between what you are (about to be) doing and the alternative course of action that would take you out to party with strangers, that contrast should be there in your mind, at one point at least, if what you are doing is to count as kalsarikännit ... Yes, you could say that kalsarikännit requires at least some level of conscious decision making. And yet, I think that no more than just some level of it is required: that it does not necessarily need to be a fully conscious decision and definitely not a carefully thought-out plan. Indeed, that is another thing that the above-cited characterizations of kalsarikännit got at least partly wrong: it is not like you mustn’t have any intention of going out; sometimes you could just kind of slip into doing kalsarikännit. Perhaps you were at first thinking about going out, and to do just a little bit of pre-drinking (“prinks,” as some say, or if you want to learn another excellent Finnish word, pohjat (literally: “bottoms”)) to get into the right mood and perhaps in order to save some money insofar as (if) you would be drinking that much less in the bar, but then a few hours later suddenly noticed that it is late at night already, or perhaps just realized that you do not feel like going out after all, so you kind of came to the conclusion that, oh well, these prinks or pohjat have now officially turned into kalsarikännit. However, to repeat: some level of decision-making is required; if the alternative course of action of going out to party does not even enter your mind – if you are, say, an alcoholic who drinks alone at home every night, or what some insensitive people might refer to as a sad lone drunk, then it is not kalsarikännit what you are doing, no matter how you are dressed.

Yes, the dressing part, I should say a word about that, too. For although, as said, kalsarit means underwear and is thus a part of the literal meaning of kalsarikännit, I would not say that they are a part of the proper semantic meaning of the term. It is more a figure of speech. Admittedly, sometimes the term is used quite literally. But it is also something that someone might make a point of, saying, amused: “Hey, you know what guys, we are literally doing kalsarikännit here!” Obviously, that would hardly be worth pointing out if it were a central part of the semantic meaning of kalsarikännit that you are in your underwear. It is not; it is more a figure of speech. So if ever you come to Finland and someone suggests that you do kalsarikännit, it does not mean that you have to take your clothes off. But I would say that kalsarikännit does imply a (very) casual dress. I mean, you might do it in a bathrobe, perhaps, or in sweatpants or shorts and t-shirt. Maybe even in a slightly more formal dress (say, if you were honestly intent on doing only some prinks and then going out, and had already half-way dressed up, but then changed your mind because your friend cancelled or something); but I would say that if you are fully dressed for partying outside, then you would at least need to throw away some pieces of clothing, say the jacket and the tie and the shoes, and open a few buttons of the shirt, to turn it more into kalsarikännit.

By Way of Postscript:

Incidentally, as I have been explaining the proper use of a word like this here, it brings to mind another funny but mistaken English translation of a Finnish term which got some attention in the internet a few years back. The word is pilkunnussija, which is a very dramatic and funny term because it would translate literally as “comma fucker.” Here the literal translation led to an even more serious misunderstanding than those involved with kalsarikännit, however: the people who presented the case to international audience online seem to have thought that pilkunnussija is a sort of dirty equivalent to the English term “Grammar Nazi”; but that, I can assure you, it is not. Actually, pilkunnussija  is only a vulgar variation of a much older term pilkunviilaaja (literally: “comma filer”), and translates quite easily and directly as “nitpicker” or “pettifogger.” The only thing that those translations miss is the vulgarity of the term. But I suppose you could easily reach that side of the term too, if you derived from “pettifogger” some idiotic variant like “pettifucker” and started using that word the same way you would use “pettifogger.” In any case, pilkunnussija is usually used in quite other than grammatical connections. Of course, it could still apply to the present case.