The Greek Cypriot Lexicon

Aftokinito

A car. More than simply a mode of transport, the aftokinito can be split into certain specific groups

1. The Mersendez or Mercedes. Ranging from the gross overpowered super-limousines of the rich to the more basic models of the genre. These are bedecked with plastic stick-on spoilers & skirts, multiple foglights, ear rupturing stereo systems & foot-high stickers that read "MERSEDES 190E" in a variety of colours & typefaces with fluorescent representations of the Mercedes star in case you missed the ones supplied by the manufacturers. These are intended to argue that it may only be a 190E but the owner wishes you to know that he knows it is not a 450SEC, however it is still totally a Mercendez. Plus he had more than enough money not only to buy it, but also even to fritter on customising it into the nether pits of automotive hell.

2. The thiplowgambinon. Described more fully elsewhere, this is the national car of Cyprus.

3. The Panjero. Marketed in the UK as the "Shogun", this 4 wheel drive Range Rover /Jeep Cherokee substitute is a middle class status symbol as compared to the more egalitarian thiplowgambinon. The major selling point to these tall, all terrain dangalakes is that they allow the occupants to look down on other road users literally as well as figuratively.

4. The Maz. Lesser Japanese/European vehicles that are imported second hand & seldom if ever reach European safety standards. Frequently (but not invariably) wives of Mercendez or Panjero owners drive these with an aggressive lack of ability &/or attention that they believe makes them appear brisk & capable. Often you will find one or more toddler standing on the transmission tunnel between the front seats under even poorer control than the car. They may also be found in the reckless hands of aggressive under-age "drivers" who treat them more like dodgem cars than the real thing. Frequently they are gifts from their parents on the child's coming of age or else starting his national service at 17 years. Presumably the proud parents consider death an acceptable alternative to conscription. These vehicles are frequently referred to by mispronounced abbreviated versions of their maker's names, a common technique for demonstrating one's fashion-consciousness . This well-worn technique has its drawbacks, however. The tale is told of the lady who offered to buy her husband a new Maz. A nice big shiny one with leather seats & everything. He indulged her gracefully & off she went to clinch the deal. After a week or two she rang him at the office to tell him it had arrived & she had taken delivery &, if anything, it was even bigger & nicer than she remembered. Her husband came home to find himself the proud owner of a brand new top of the range C£75,000 Mazarati. We are given to understand that he was somewhat distressed.

5. The saravallo, or "rot-box". These decrepit vehicles with their bedraggled drivers are a major hazard for two reasons.

a) These cars tend to be from a distant time when sheet steel rather than plastic was the order of the day & endurance rather than performance was the ideal. Geriatric Volvos, Austin A40 vans & Russian tractors. They may be falling to bits, but once you get them going they could chew up a motorway bridge without difficulty. Compounded with the inevitable lack of brakes, steering, lights, no tread on the tyres & the lack of visual acuity/intellect of the driver, this property of resilience is regrettable.

b) The car's driver is usually either on the verge of collapse due to advancing age or else a mindless 14 year old showing off to his schoolmates. Thus they are either effectively or else literally deaf & blind with all the road sense of a hedgehog . They pull unhesitatingly out into fast moving streams of traffic at a dogged if juddery   five M.P.H. secure in the belief that only a fully laden concrete mixer or perhaps a train can harm them. Unfortunately, in view of what they are driving, they are probably correct.

Naturally they are neither taxed nor insured as the drivers licence either never existed or else expired in 1962. Futhermore, if you try to take them to court the police will try to discourage you on the basis that it is androbee.  Your multiple traumas & mangled car will not be discussed.

Agabee

Love. This can be sub divided into physical love & spiritual love.

The Greeks use two words to describe these states & since both appear to be fully interchangeable we will deal with both together.

1.Agabee. First degree love. This is a word used to describe what one feels for pets, yinaiges of type one & sometimes type three & children.

2.Erotas. Second degree love, a more serious proposition as it applies to yinaiges of types two & four & in theory type one if newly married. It also refers to the act of love itself with whomever it is performed. Thus it is possible to make (kano – I make or do) Erotas with someone for whom you feel little or no agabee, or alternatively a first or second degree passion.

Differentiation between the two states is largely academic since Monday's Erotas is often Tuesday's Agabee & Friday's Bia; (Who? Fem.) especially in the tourist season.

The only precaution worthy of comment is to be sure that when you say agabee, they are not thinking erotas, or indeed vice versa. This is not always a good area for experiment.

Amballados

One who is deliberately & pig headedly uncooperative in persistently pretending that he fails to understand the glaringly obvious with needlessly destructive results.

It is a curious point that such a complex concept should have a single word to express it. Presumably there were or are enough amballadi (pl.) in Cyprus to justify giving them a word all to themselves. Even more so since there is even the fine distinction of takouromenos, an amballados of less than usual intelligence.

The typical amballados is one who understands what is required of him & has the ability or perhaps even the obligation to deliver, but despite on pain of death refuses. He is frequently immolated in these disasters of his own creation but will not acknowledge fault.

His motives are often a mystery, perhaps even to himself. It has been suggested that if an amballados receives an instruction at gun point not to jump into a vat of acid from a source he does not want to be seen to obey, he would rather die in the vat than live in the knowledge of his obedience however forced.

Thus to get rid of an amballados , instruct him to breathe.

Androbee

Embarrassing or shameful. This is usually used as an admonishment to a person/people to discourage them from performing what the speaker claims he believes to be a "faux pas", although the context is frequently self serving. Usually this act is something you have a perfect right to do but the speaker just does not want you to for reasons undisclosed.

For example, when an uninsured yeahros under the influence of alcohol drives his motora through the closed French windows at the front of your house before vomiting blood into the back of the television, the policeman may observe uncomfortably & with a pained expression that it is androbee to prosecute this poor old wreck, even if it is the third time this month & last time he used the cat to beat out the flames from the blazing petrol on his trousers.

The fact that the old man is the policeman's father-in law would only be androbee if you knew it.

Angouri

A cucumber. Taken literally this refers to the popular salad vegetable served by the English in sandwiches. It Cyprus it performs a similar function but is also used as something to growl contemptuously at times of disbelief. This is based on the cucumber's topographical similarity to the male organ & thus gives rise to the phrase Afti theli angouri or "She wants a cucumber". This implies that the female referred to requires a good seeing-to to cause her to desist with whatever she may be doing to upset the (usually) male employing the phrase.

It is strongly recommended those persons wishing to acquire cucumbers take care to phrase their request cautiously to avoid embarrassment, or ask for angouraki or small cucumbers which (in the anatomical sense) no Greek will ever admit to possessing.

Batiha

A watermelon, often weighing up to 5Kg or more & grown locally. It is also used to exemplify the head of intellectually challenged individuals in the phrase Hani ee batiha dou, literally "his melon is leaking" or figuratively that the individual is either totally barking or at least well on his way there.

There are drawbacks with this phrase however.

1.You may be taken literally & some helpful individual may then encourage you to help clean up the mess.

2.Persons with "flawed melon syndrome" (FMS) are by & large glaringly obvious, & thus only another "flawed melon" would waste time & energy pointing them out.

3.If you stood in a single spot anywhere in Cyprus & pointed out all the persons with FMS, you would spend your whole day at the task thus suggesting that your own batiha might need more than a little patching in view of your compulsive need to emphasise the blazingly obvious.

Bezi

Literally "He/she plays." This can be used in the context of playing a game or playing a musical instrument, but the most curious context is in its use as meaning to pretend to be or to mimic but badly.

Bezi kyries means that the person accused is playing at being a lady – the implication invariably being that she is doing so unsuccessfully. Likewise we find Bezi do ballikari , playing the hero, Bezi do yiatro, playing the doctor or bezi don balavos, pretending to be more stupid than you really are for purposes of gain. The art to survival in Cyprus is to find people who for all their limitations do not seem to feel the need to be bezi- ing at anything. These are usually the ones who are accused of Bezi-ing o ecsebnos, otherwise known as pretending to be clever.

Bomba

This word is used in three separate ways.

1.An ice-lolly. Although fallen into disuse in favour of the Cypriot bippilon or else the Greek glifintzouri, this was originally used to refer to the frozen dessert on a stick beloved by children in the hot summer months.

2.Great. The exclamation of bomba! denotes enthusiastic agreement or approval. It is not as popular as it once was as the Hellenisation of the local dialect is has rendered many of the old idioms unfashionable as they are seen as rustic & unsophisticated. It is still used ironically on occasion.

3.An explosive device. Usually made from stolen military materials or else from the freely available nitrates & sulphur used agriculturally, this is a convenient tool for murder among individuals in the underworld of (primarily) Limassol. Recently the popularity of the technique has ebbed in the face of an upsurge in shootings with automatic weapons.

Accordingly, if you go to Limassol & are delighted to find the ice-lolly of your choice, when you find your glifintzouri, remember to exclaim oreah! (beautiful!) to avoid any possibility of giving the wrong impression. Alternatively, buy an ice cream & just say "thank-you^* ". They will understand.

* Evharisto

Bombos

A character frequently used in Greek jokes when the story requires a total dolt. It is used also to clearly imply someone is a fool or acting foolishly if you address an individual as reh, Bombo. (Literally "Oi, Bombos.")

Bombos is also an interesting paradox that highlights a few curious nooks & crannies in the Cypriots' perception of themselves & the world.

For example, one joke explores the fifteen-year-old Bombos asking why his reproductive organ is four times as big as everyone else's in his class. The answer is that his scholastic performance was so poor that he was still re-sitting first year of infants. Thus he was twice a fool. Once for failing at school & again for not knowing that he had failed.

Yet in a recently broadcast TV survey, not one individual questioned in the town of Nicosia was willing to admit to remembering the last book they had read. The generally robust responses were to the effect "What! Me? I don't read books". One older male (45+) even boasted that he only ever read Plehboie (Playboy).

Yet onlookers & interviewer, (presumably a trained journalist), actually applauded this classically Bombos like display of intellectual non-performance. Furthermore, the article was viewed as a good choice of material for broadcast on national television.

In another story Bombos is in a class of English language students, & is required to construct a sentence from the words green yellow & pink. The efforts of his classmates are predictable, but our anti-hero comes up with "Green green (ring ring) goes the telephone. Yellow? (Hello?) No one there so hangs up the phone. Pink. (Sound of phone hanging up.)

Bombos originality & humour is automatically derided as stupidity in the assumption that he has failed to understand the question, without considering that perhaps his more pedestrian classmates were being laughed at by Bombos who was offering an entire short story instead of their one sentence.

Further, for the purposes of the joke, it assumes in the humorist's audience an understanding of basic English that a self confessed unread, anti-intellectual member of the public would be unlikely to admit to.

Funny, eh?

Cabaret

A club where music is played live for dancing & food is often available. Latterly though the cabaret or as it was once known the bouzouki^* is an all male preserve where X-rated floor shows are performed to an audience who may later purchase the performers for their private & more intimate enjoyment. It is in effect a "shop window" in which alleged artistes display their limited terpsichorean talents in order to attract clients who will treat them as their yinaiga (Type two) until the money runs out.

Thus these once cheerful family clubs have been sacrificed allegedly on the ever rapacious altar of tourism, despite the fact it is rare to unheard of to see a tourist in a cabaret. This is because an injudicious foreigner who enters these establishments is immediately equipped with a yinaiga or two for whom he is expected to pay whether he wants them (in either sense of the word) or not.

On one occasion, an unsuspecting gentleman from Norway was charged £420 for twenty minutes conversation with two such persons & a bottle of whisky neither of which he desired. (Also in either sense of the word). He was then escorted a cash machine to ensure he did not get lost (in any sense of the word) where fate in the shape of a concerned local person courageously intervened.

(A bottle of Whisky is priced locally at £12 if imported or £3 if local. Local spirits are frequently sold in the bottles of imported brands in order to boost profit margins. The water used in diluting both types prior to offering them for sale is usually local. )

Persons who frequent cabarets are known as cabarehgis (sing.) or cabarehgies (pl.). These individuals are known to be hard drinking, stand no nonsense manges (pl.) readily able to spent large quantities of their money or their yinaiga's (type one) money or indeed any money whatever from whoever in the drunken pursuit of personal gratification with under dressed, over-vivacious Roumanezas & condoms provided free.

Any venue with the words club, bouzouki, cabaret, or any reference to a balletto (dance troupe) should be avoided as if intensely radioactive. Signs or photographs that illustrate clumsily posed young women, nude or scantily clad, are the clearest possible warnings of a tourist Chernobyl - it might have been fun to go there once, but it would not be such a good idea to go there now, or indeed for the next few centuries.

^*After the Greek musical instrument of the same name, superficially similar to the balalaika of Russia.

Charlie

A Cypriot male, born in the United Kingdom, Charloua if female. This may also be applied to Cyprus-born Cypriots if their sojourn abroad has rendered them sufficiently anglicised.

This group, or their parents, compelled by the disasters of the 1974 Turkish invasion, or post World War II^* poverty moved to Britain to seek their fortunes or at least recoup their considerable losses.

By & large they worked hard & later returned to Cyprus with money & a desire to re establish their lives in their or their parents' homeland.

These individuals fall into two groups both of whom are equally despised.

1. Charlie/Charloua type 1. This person combines the best of the English/Cypriot fusion they represent. The politeness of the English with the hard working enthusiasm of the Cypriot. The negative aspects of the two races are to some degree filtered out by their experiences, plus the fact that outside Cyprus most mangoscines are arrestable offences under law.

2. Charlie/Charloua type 2. This person combines the worst of the English/Cypriot fusion they represent. The arrogance of the English with the intelligence of the Cypriot. The positive aspects of the two races are totally filtered out by their experiences, plus the fact that they are not outside Cyprus any more.

• The Charlies actually possess the experience & sophistication the Cypriots like pretend to. For example, relatively few own thiplowgambina or even feel any need to apologise for this deficiency. Thus when a Cypriot drops a casual "Y'know" or "innit" into conversation to imply his easy familiarity with the English language, a Charlie may then address the speaker fluently in that language & so explore his actual state of linguistic proficiency. Thus the Cypriot is embarrassed & made to feel a gouloufos
• The Charlies often have money, but do not feel the need to tell everybody about it or at least to give it freely to the local population on demand. This combination of riches & restraint is not readily forgivable in a land motivated by external validation to the degree of building shrines the concept.
• Charlouas tend to be unmoved by mangoscines & have even been known to find such behaviour amusing. This is offensive to the Cypriot male whom even at the age of 45 & an unladen weight of 120 Kg knows his sexual irresistibility to these females is & must remain beyond question. Bathing regularly, shaving occasionally & changing his underwear would be merely gilding the lily.
• Type two Charlies are more Cypriot than the Cypriots are, which is enough to upset anybody forced to share a planet with them.

^* 1939-1945 (1946 in the Pacific)

^**Young upwardly mobile professionals. A 1980's phenomenon in Britain characterised by youth, near feudal rudeness, arrogance & ignorance.