Finnish Peculiarities, Part III: “Fiilistellä”

I continue with the short series that I introduced in a post a couple weeks ago, showcasing some peculiar, hardly translatable Finnish words. In the previous two posts I examined rather old terms, but this time around I want to discuss a relatively novel one: the verb fiilistellä.

As you might have guessed by the looks of that word already, the stem for fiilistellä actually comes from English. (Due to the global prominence of English language, that is hardly an uncommon circumstance with novel Finnish words.) In the present case, the stem is “feeling” (or, “feel”). As far as I can tell, however, fiilistellä is not directly derived from “feeling,” but rather from another Finnish term which in turn was derived from it. That other Finnish term is the noun fiilis.

A further intriguing fact about this is that, fiilis was not a simple loan word: it was not a Finnishized version of the English “feeling,” but was more or less a real novelty, a new concept in its own right, only inspired by and loosely utilizing or building upon “feeling.”

That is, from the beginning, fiilis had a peculiar meaning of its own. Or, a duality of meanings, actually. For the meaning of fiilis is, either the general feel or vibe of a situation, or the general feelings that someone is having at the moment. “Mikä fiilis?” (literally: “What fiilis?”; or, “How’s the fiilis?” ) is a question that someone might ask you at a party, for instance, or in a rock concert, or in some other social event, to enquire about your feelings in that situation: are you having fun, blown away even, or are you perhaps disappointed with the event? But also, “Hyvä fiilis täällä!” (“Good fiilis here!”) is something that one might exclaim to others, meaning, roughly, “Good vibes / atmosphere here!” 

However, when the verb fiilistellä evolved, it again came to mean something rather different from the noun fiilis.

When someone is doing fiilistely (I fiilistelen, you fiilistelet, he/she fiilistelee, we fiilistelemme, you (plural) fiilistelette, they fiilistelevät), what they are doing is, basically, reflectively enjoying (the ambiance of) a situation, or the positive feelings it arouses in them, and to an extent intentionally pumping up those positive feelings in themselves and perhaps also in others.

Usually it is the present situation, or something that has just happened a brief moment ago, but it is also possible to fiilistellä about a long past event.

Secondly, please appreciate that there is not a trace of any kind of malicious mentality involved in fiilistely per se; that alone makes it different from the English verb “to gloat,” for example. Of course, someone might take offense from your fiilistely, or become jealous and angry or sarcastic about it, but fiilistely as such is purely a positive thing, just self-reflective enjoyment. Often a pretty good translation would be that one is “savoring the moment”; or, in the more unfrequent case where it is prompted by a long past event, “reminiscing fondly.” But there is something more to it than that.

A few examples might be helpful. Perhaps you see this beautiful sunset, while sipping a nice drink and reflecting upon what a great day you had today and how you do not really have a worry in the world at the moment, that life is just very good right now. Or, suppose that you (and perhaps some friends or collaborators) rejoice about and take pride in some great performance you just did, like a job exceptionally well done at work, or a victory in some sports competition. Or, maybe you are listening to a good band at a club, having a good time. Or, you could just hear an effective song on radio, a song that perhaps reminds you of your youth or of some happy times. Somewhat miscellaneous lot though these examples might sound, any of them could plausibly be expected to give occasion to fiilistely.

Fiilistely is close to or shares some overlap with the English term “rejoicing,” then, but, significantly, it is much more (self-)reflective, oftentimes even contemplating, than simple “rejoicing.” The contrast is stronger still to more overwhelming emotions, and hence to expressions like “going euphoric.” Much the same contrast could be drawn even to the term “celebrating.” These all tend to be less reflective, and also more intense, affairs than fiilistely ... Euphoria and celebrating are much less under the subject’s mental control than fiilistely.

With fiilistely you are (supposed to be) rather more in control of your emotionality, able to consciously guide the way you are feeling. This is not to say that there is not a good deal of raw emotionality involved: it is hard if not impossible to just make a cool and calculated decision to fiilistellä if you do not feel like it; and, on the other hand, the emotionality involved in fiilistely may not be easy to control – for example, it might make you say or do things that you regret later, perhaps something that, in retrospect, you suspect made you come across like an idiot, or a boastful ass, to some other people in the room. Still, we should say that, when you fiilistelet, you maintain some composure. Of course, that naturally goes together with the fact that fiilistely is less intense than, say, celebrating. (We have another, much more aptly corresponding Finnish term for “celebrating”: juhlia).


One good example to illustrate this all is that, imagine that you are playing football and score a goal for your team. You will then at first be too euphoric, for sure, much too emotional and too much in the middle of it all, to fiilistellä about it. You will be celebrating the goal with your teammates, but that is different from fiilistely. And after the celebrations, if the game still goes on and you are actively involved in it, the playing of the game will probably require too much concentration for you to have a chance to fiilistellä about that earlier performance until the game is over: if you fiilistelet in the middle of something like that, chances are that you get distracted and the opponent in turn scores a goal on your team because you are not paying attention, are just standing there glassy-eyed, as it were, grinning stupidly about something you did five minutes ago. After the game, however, it is different; then you could and probably will allow yourself to fiilistellä about that goal you scored.

As said, fiilistely need not be retrospective and indeed more often than not takes place either at the moment of or immediately after the event that one fiilistelee about, but you really cannot do it when you have to concentrate on some physically or cognitively demanding task or performance, so if it is that sort of task or performance that you are about to fiilistellä, then you should do it retrospectively. By contrast, enjoying music, or a sunset, or some good company, for example, is not too demanding a task to prevent you from engaging in some fiilistely about the experience concurrently. So it depends on what it is that you fiilistelet about.

The external causes of, or the things that could give rise to (the lust for) fiilistely range from small and altogether subjective joys of life to truly remarkable events for which just about anybody not pumped full of tranquilizers would be over the moon. One pretty good rule of thumb for spotting a situation where you could use the term fiilistellä is whether the person seems to be reflecting about a situation and could plausibly be expected to say something like: “Yes, me likey very much; more of this, please!”; or, “Yeah, I’m the Man! Sometimes I really am, right?”; or, perhaps: “Damn, that was good! Life is good (or, was good back then)!” If that is the case, you might conceivably say that the person fiilistelee. 

Notice, then, that there is at least a little bit of effort involved in fiilistely – it is something that one must be actively doing. One is pumping up the positive feelings (and perhaps trying to evoke them in others, too) for starters; also, one is quite self-consciously enjoying those positive feelings, as if tasting them. It is a little bit like rolling those feelings on the taste buds of one’s brain/mind. And, if you can see that the situation is a rare one, you might be putting even more conscious effort into it, perhaps trying to pay attention to and savor and memorize as many aspects of it as possible. In some exceptional cases, when one, in a way, goes to “eleven” with fiilistely, it could even lead to a good bit of nostalgizing; that is, you might be saying to yourself: “That was one of the best moments of my life,” or, “This here, right now, might just be one of the best moments in my life.” More often, of course, one only fiilistelee about some little things in life, those mundane, everyday pleasures; it could be just that it is Friday (finally!) and that you have a plan to crack open a cold one to celebrate. You might well fiilistellä about that, too.

Having said that, I do not want to leave the impression that fiilistely is necessarily a solitary affair. In fact, you can very well fiilistellä together with others and make it a shared experience. In that case,  of course, those others would have to be prone to feeling similarly about the situation (if they don’t, they will not be likely to join you in fiilistely but might instead think you are a bit silly (if what you fiilistelet about is something that they find trivial), or might even take you for an inconsiderate asshole (if what you fiilistelet about is something that they find sad or appalling)). The others need not instantly be eager to fiilistellä with you though: you could try and win them over! You can also be quite explicit about it and ask those others to join you in fiilistely: “Let’s fiilistellään about this a little, c’mon! I mean, this is a pretty special, cool moment, isn’t it ...?”

There are obviously marked differences between solitary and group fiilistely: when you fiilistelet by yourself, it is certain to involve a good deal of self-reflection, whereas when you fiilistelet with a group of others, it might shift closer to group celebrations; but even in the latter case, I would advice against equating fiilistely with celebrating: there is always the aspect of reflectiveness involved, which pretty much guarantees that fiilistely will not be too frantic and emotional.

One more thing. I think the tendency to fiilistely is to a certain degree very much a matter of personality. That is to say, fiilistely is something that agrees much better with certain kinds of personalities, but not with others. I mean, some people just seem unable to (allow themselves to) fiilistellä about things. For some people, it might be that they are too harsh for themselves. For others, perhaps they are afraid that if they fiilistelevät about something, then something truly horrible will soon happen, bad karma come bite them in the ass. For some people, it might be that they are too sombre, pessimistic, or bitter to allow themselves to fiilistellä; their personality or life-history prevents them from admitting that something truly and unequivocally good just happened. And, of course, there will be some truly nasty mother bunkers whose only moments of happiness and enjoyment in life come from other people’s adversities, for whom schadenfreude (in Finnish, vahingonilo) is the only kind of enjoyment they are capable of feeling; and schadenfreude is obviously very different from fiilistely. Yeah, I feel sorry for those kinds of people incapable of fiilistely. To me it has always been natural to find reasons to fiilistellä a little bit every now and then. I think it is one of those things that make life worth living.

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.

Lost in Translation; or, Finnish Peculiarities: “Löyly”

It would be an understatement, really, to say that language is a powerful tool of thought and reason. More to the point, language creates (human) thought and reason; or, if you insist on the tool metaphor, language is the tool of thought of reason. It is essential for conceptualizing and hence for conceiving any issue (of even moderate complexity) clearly, essential for forming contents of propositional attitudes such as beliefs about anything (e.g., Davidson 1984, 155–170). It is hardly surprising, then, that people are intrigued by differences between languages, cases where concepts in one language seem to have no exact translation in another. There are pretty good grounds for surmising that such differences make the world look rather different in different languages (although, probably, far less so than some of the strongest versions of linguistic relativity would have it) (e.g., Deutscher 2011). 

We do not want to overshoot that idea, of course (well, why would we want to overshoot anything, huh!?). Donald Davidson (1984, 183–198), for one, famously believed (perhaps because he wanted to keep faith with there always being the possibility of rational discussion between people coming from different cultural backgrounds) that there just cannot be any ultimate untranslatability between two languages (at least in the sense that those languages should be conceived of as constituting two different “schemas” of conceptualization that would cut the world into objects in two irreconcileably different ways). Nevertheless, even presuming that Davidson was right (which, of course, remains debatable, as pretty much every philosophical question ever), there would still be no shortage of cases of at least slightly less fundamental difficulties with translation. Indeed, it is not at all uncommon to have a situation where a truly satisfactory translation is very, very hard to accomplish (at least for a human translator – leaving aside here the whole issue of machine translation); arguably, some of those situations might even require a translator to have been laboriously trained in the practices of the other culture, even slowly socialized into their way of life. What is more, many of us believe, a perfect translation might in some cases escape translation completely: there may be words and contexts where even the very best, ideal translator could only hope for a sort of “fusion of horizons” between two cultures. (Medina 2003, 468–469.)

We now live in the Age of the Internet, of course, and there are literally hundreds, nay thousands of examples to be found online, of words of this or that foreign language that are reportedly very hard if not impossible to translate into English. I constantly come across with posts and articles where someone lists perhaps five or fifteen or twenty-five terms, expressions, or sayings in some language that apparently lack any precise equivalent in English. To give but a couple of examples from other Indo-European languages (which should prima facie be relatively easily translatable into English), here are ten terms and phrases that they have in Icelandic but are lacking from English; here are ten Swedish words that you supposedly need in English; here are ten Russian terms without proper English equivalents; and here, if you will, find a Wikipedia page listing loads of German words that are often used in English sentences, many of them apparently for lack of a perfectly satisfactory English alternative; and here, finally, is a list of no less than thirty un- or scarcely translatable words collected from a few different languages (German and Swedish are included, so there is some overlap with the previous lists here, but there are also, for example, some Spanish and Japanese words, too).

My own language, Finnish is not an Indo-European language, so one might expect even more difficulties with translations into English than with the previous examples. Sure enough, there are several Finnish words lacking any one exact English translation. We know the usual suspects, like sauna, of course, which is indeed an apt example because it is one of the few to have been actually adopted from Finnish into English as a loanword. There is also the good old sisu (and the adjective sisukas derived from it), a classic example of barely translatable Finnish word. Personally, though, I should mention, I think that there has oftentimes been some unnecessary mystification of sisu and sisukas, and that in most contexts those terms could in fact be translated quite satisfactorily. It is just that, different translations would be advisable in different contexts: sometimes it would be best to use the term “grit”; sometimes you could say the person we are referring to “has guts”; or that it is characteristic of the person to show “perseverance,” or “steadfastness” (in the face of hardships) – that s/he tends to be “persistent” in trying to overcome (even quite bad and/or numerous) obstacles; or that the person is “unyielding”; and so on. It is surely correct to say that there is no single English term that captures sisu or sisukas in every context; but then again, there is no way to translate the English expression “guts” into Finnish with a single term in every context either: no term that literally means the intestines but can also be used in slang expressions like “have guts,” or “gutsy.”

Indeed, this is by no means an uncommon situation between any two languages; for example, as Deutscher (2011, 14), among others, has pointed out, there is no one term in English to cover all the meanings of the French word esprit: you need several different terms for the different uses or senses of esprit (wit, mood, spirit, mind); and, similarly, there is no single concept in French to cover all the meanings of the English word “mind,” which in different connections should to be translated with different terms (esprit, tête, avis, raison, intelligence). That causes problems for translators, especially when the phrase to be translated makes a wordplay or cracks a joke that relies on a double meaning that simply does not exist in the other language. (We Finns come across demonstrations of this more often than people in the many other countries where movies and TV programs are translated by means of vocal dubbing, because since in our country translations are mostly carried out by means of subtitles, we can compare the original, which we can hear, and the Finnish translation, which we can see in text form.)

Now, what I was planning on doing here after this brief intro, was something similar to many of the posts to which I offered links just above: I was thinking of listing a few (at least, five) Finnish terms that I have found hardly or only very laboredly and awkwardly translatable into English (some a little bit fresher examples than the tired old sauna, sisu, etc., too!)

As it turned out, there was a major problem with that plan, however: you see, when I explain anything I tend to be rather, how should I put this, thorough (as well as prone to digressing), and the task of explaining Finnish concepts to foreigners is a subject especially likely to bring out the worst in me in that respect (as you may have gathered from my previous post discussing the concept of kalsarikännit; to say nothing of the one that aimed to offer a full cultural-historical explanation of the notions of spede and spedeily). Accordingly, explaining five Finnish concepts would have constituted an all too lengthy writing for a blog post, like some 20+ pages long as a Word document. So, a change of plan: I cut the text that I was preparing into shorter pieces and will publish it as a series of distinct posts, each of which will discuss one hardly translatable Finnish concept.

In the present post, I will start with an old, indeed ancient term, one closely linked with sauna in our culture but much less known and discussed outside Finland: löyly. 

Löyly (noun) : the hot water vapor and the consequently intensified experience of heat in sauna, usually brought about by casting some water onto the hot rocks of the sauna stove (called kiuas, in Finnish). 

There will always be a löylykaukalo (löyly vat) in a Finnish sauna, and in that vat there should be some nice cool löylyvesi (löyly water) (if the vat is empty, the one who has been doing the löylynheitto (löyly casting / throwing) will be expected to go out and fill it), as well as a löylykauha (löyly scoop), of course, with which you do the löylynheitto.

A typical löyly vat and löyly scoop

The word löyly would therefore seem to have a very useful reference, at least for anyone who at least sometimes go and bathe in a Finnish (or, Scandinavian, Russian, Baltic, and I know some Native American tribes have had something similar) type of sauna where there is a hot stove onto which you are expected to cast, throw or pour water so as to increase the intensity of the heat. I mean, surely, it would have to be convenient to have a single word to capture the complex English notion of “hot water vapor and the consequently intensified experience of heat in sauna (brought about by casting some water onto the hot rocks of the stove)”? Even if in practice you are able to cut it down to something more pragmatic like, “Could you cast some of that water onto those rocks, please?”; you should still find it useful to have this ingenious Finnish word by means of which to pack a few more words into one and simply ask, “Could you cast some löyly, please?”

The reason why löyly has not been adopted into English as a loan word is pretty obvious, though: Finnish sort of sauna has not (yet) become quite popular enough in English speaking countries. The word sauna was adopted, meanwhile, because the English speaking world did find it convenient to have a word for many sorts of hot rooms; the word “sauna,” after all, refers not just to the Finnish kind of sauna but also to the kind of steam room that we Finns would call “steam sauna,” or “turkish sauna,” where there is no hot stove at all and no löyly water. 

In any case, now that I have explained the referent of löyly, some of you might think that the concept is not all that complicated after all, that not much would be lost in translation if you just came up with a new English term with the same referent, or simply translated it as “hot sauna-steam,” or something like that. Alas (well, no, I am not actually sorry about this, that was just a rhetorical device in this case), it is more complicated than that. Reference, as many of us know, is not all of the word meaning. There is also what is sometimes referred to as the internal content of the term; that is, you need to consider not just the extension of the word, but also its intension. With the latter, you would also have to consider the relations that the word has to a number of other words, especially to those by means of which we might try and explain the meaning of that word. Various connotations of the term that are not part of its referent might also be said to be a part of its meaning, broadly conceived, if they are such that tend to come to the mind of a typical speaker of the language. So let me say a little bit more to truly exhaustively explain the notion of löyly...

One thing that is important to know, I think, is that, when you bathe in sauna, it is precisely the löyly that can hurt you! There are not many saunas where the temperature could all by itself rise too unbearable without anybody casting any löyly, but in most saunas, once someone does start casting löyly (especially someone who “likes it hot,” perhaps much hotter than you (as often happens in a public sauna, say at some swimming baths sauna room where there might be a dozen guys at the same time and it is totally up for grabs who happens to be sitting next to the löylykaukalo, perhaps some S&M enthusiast ...)), well then, more often than not, you are about to experience some pain real soon.

Equally important, however, is that to get good löylys is why many if not most Finns go to sauna in the first place: not very many people go there just to sit there, sweating ever so mildly, and to then come out and take a shower; no, instead, most people spend there maybe only ten minutes at a time, take a few relatively intense löylys that really squeeze the sweat out from beneath their skin and make the heat feel at least a little uncomfortable already, and only then come out and take that shower (and then, more often than not, repeat the sauna-shower-sauna-shower circle a couple more times).

Another noteworthy thing about the slight pain that löyly brings about is that, precisely because it is the löyly that hurts you in sauna, it usually is not what kills you there. Now I am not trying to scare you here, and want to stress that, in general, sauna is actually good for your health (regular sauna bathing reduces the risk of various health problems like cardiovascular issues), but it is a simple fact that every once in a while someone dies in sauna, too. However, most of those would be cases of a person having fallen asleep (or, more likely, passed out after too much alchohol) in sauna alone and then dying of dehydration. So, löyly is not to be blamed for most of those deaths; quite the opposite: a bit of burning sensation from löyly would probably have kept those people awake and thus alive! Indeed, usually, it is not the löyly that kills you – although, of course, there have been some exceptions. Some people like having löyly- (or, sauna bathing-) competitions of sort – to compete in who lasts for longest in hot löylys; and that kind of arrangement can be a recipe for disaster. An extreme example is what happened at the (last ever, for obvious reasons) official World Championships of Sauna Bathing, in Heinola, 2010: in the finale, one competitor, an over-60-year-old man from Russia, actually died, and another, Finnish competitor got life-threatening burn injuries – large areas of his skin peeled off and he was hospitalized for three months. (As a grotesque sequel, Finnish tabloids would keep writing about him for an extended period of time, and for that purpose gave him a tabloid name, Sauna-Timo or Saunoja-Timo (Timo is the man’s first name and saunoja is a term referring to a person doing sauna bathing – from the verb saunoa for sauna bathing –, so the latter tabloid name translates “Sauna-bathing Timo” (more than a bit ironically, given that, because of his badly burned skin the man could not do any sauna bathing for a long time after the incident)).)

Another thing I want to mention about löyly is how much it depends on the particular sauna – on the size of the sauna, on the stove and the arrangement of the stones on it, on the materials and structures and ventilation of the sauna, etc.: having bathed in several dozens different saunas over my lifetime, I can assure you that there are truly remarkable, consequential differences between saunas, which do have quite a crucial impact on what kind of löylys you will get in them. In some saunas, casting even a single little scoop of löyly water onto the stones will at once give you an intense burning sensation over your skin, even such that most people will be crouching their face toward their knees, grinning with pain, and will want to wait for a few minutes before risking another scoop. In other saunas, it might take half-a-dozen or so scoops of water slowly poured onto different spots of the kiuas stones over a period of ten or twenty seconds or so to reach a similar sensation, but in many of those latter kind of saunas the löyly will then probably also last much longer, and in some of them it might build up to be in a way even more intense than in the sauna with immediately burning löyly, perhaps: you might see some guy walking out of there with his upper torso so boiled that its color is actually bright red, as if he was a lobster just picked out from a kettle of boiling water. On the other hand, there are also saunas where the löyly is very moist, and where there is not enough ventilation, so that the humidity will quickly get so high that it is hard to breathe. In that kind of saunas, it might actually  turn out to be the humidity that forces you out sooner than any burning sensation. In the best (in my humble opinion) saunas, by contrast, breathing is not a problem, and the löyly may also turn out so soft that you could easily sit there for half-an-hour or even longer, throw in a couple scoops every few minutes, and the intensity of the heat still wouldn’t build up too high, would remain just right, making you sweat properly but not burning you too much. That latter is how I personally prefer my sauna experience; but people are different, and I know that some people actually want to walk out of sauna looking like boiled lobsters – that if they don’t, they will feel like there was something wrong with the sauna, that one can’t get proper löylys in it.

Finally, some trivia about löyly to truly wrap this up:

First, the term has actually had also another, now altogether obsolete and generally forgotten meaning: in pagan times, löyly could be used to refer to a kind of spirit or soul, the breath-soul, so that when someone died and stopped breathing, others might have said the löyly has left him/her. 

Second, as the term’s reference includes the increased intensity of heat in sauna, it is perhaps understandable how it has become customary to use expressions like  Lisää löylyä! (“More löyly!”) or Eiköhän lisätä löylyä? (“Let’s increase löyly, right?”) as metaphors not unlike the English metaphoric expression “Let’s increase the / put on some more heat / pressure.” You might hear an ice hockey player, for example, saying something like that in an interview before the final period: the opponent is getting tired, now we will just put on lisää löylyä and we will surely win this game. Related to this, there is also the verb löylyttää and the noun löylytys, meaning, basically, “utterly beating someone,” and “utter beating,” respectively.

Third, fun fact: in Finnish the translation for English expression “blood bath” (for a massacre or much bloodshed in a battle) is actually verilöyly, which is literally, you guessed it, “blood löyly.” I think the Finnish term is a bit tastier and more expressive, although it is rather idiomatic in the sense that we rarely if ever think about its literal meaning when using it. But if you stop and think about it, the notion of löyly captures the heat and the intensity, indeed the pain of a battle or massacre, much better than the notion of “blood bath.” Granted, blood bath does give us a vivid image of blood flowing and pooling, constituting something where one could wade in, something that splashes everywhere, but blood löyly would be this highly intense, stingingly painful affair, where blood could be imagined to fill the air, hot and steaming, even burning your skin.

References

Davidson, Donald (1984). Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Deutscher, Guy (2011). Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. London: Arrow Books.

Medina, Jose (2003) “On Being ‘Other-Minded’: Wittgenstein, Davidson, and Logical Aliens”, International Philosophical Quarterly 43(4): 463–75.

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.