If we have learned anything from lagom, còsagach and ikigai – self-help concepts borrowed from the rituals and perspective of other countries – it’s that heavy is the head that wears hygge’s crown.
Many words have tried to capitalise on the success of the Danish art of enjoying life’s pleasures and feeling content. Lagom, a Swedish word that effectively means everything in moderation, got close but has since petered out. The rest are long forgotten.
Now, there’s a new contender. It’s been a good few months since we found a word from another language that doesn’t translate exactly, describes a lifestyle which, though desirable, is impossible to assimilate, and which we have co-opted and mispronounced until it entered the everyday vernacular – but not before selling a few million cosy rugs in the process.
If you haven’t heard of meraki yet, you may have seen it without realising. It’s a Greek adjective that loosely means doing something with love, brio and care – but it’s also a festival in St Albans, a few beauty salons in the UK, half a dozen Greek restaurants, a Danish lifestyle and skincare brand, and now a clothing line of elevated basics from Amazon.
The idea, says Harri Crosby, a senior menswear designer at Amazon Fashion Private Brands, is for a 90-piece collection that is “thoughtfully designed”, in a “core colour palette” and which is so simple that, when you get dressed in Meraki clothing, you will save some of the 16 minutes the average woman supposedly spends getting dressed each morning. Time which, if correctly harnessed, could be used to do something more fruitful, such as make a meraki breakfast, take a more leisurely meraki commute, or finish last night’s row with a dash of meraki.
Dr Myrto Hatzimichali, a lecturer in classics at the University of Cambridge, isn’t convinced: “I was wondering if they had picked a Turkish word, because it has a slightly different meaning,” she says of the word, which entered the Greek language from Turkish but whose meaning has evolved. In Turkish, she says, “it means care, worry, or even hobby”. The Greek is harder to translate. “It loosely means taking pleasure at your work. Doing something with joy, attention to detail, putting in the extra mile. With craftsmanship, it means made with love and care and taking pride.” To Hatzimichali, it feels arbitrary unless, that is, “they are trying to emphasise the care taken with craftsmanship”.
Hatzimichali’s issue lies less with the translation – “although a lot of Greek words are untranslateable” – and more with using the word in this context altogether. “It’s not a concept. It’s not hygge,” she says. Still, “it’s nice to boost interest in Greek culture, so I’m not against it”.
Amazon came up with the word using a concept as old as meraki itself – collaborative branding – but while it’s easy to be cynical about its use, at least we can pronounce this one.
